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Young Yazidi woman commits suicide at IDP camp in Iraqi Kurdistan

Young Yazidi woman commits suicide at IDP camp in Iraqi Kurdistan
Young Yazidi woman commits suicide at IDP camp in Iraqi Kurdistan

2019-02-03 00:00:00 - Source: Iraq News

Ayshan Ali Salih, a young Yazidi woman commits suicide at IDP camp in Iraqi Kurdistan, February 2019. Photo: SM

DUHOK, Iraq’s Kurdistan region,— A Yazidi (Ezidi) woman committed suicide in one of the camps for internally displaced persons (IDP) in Iraqi Kurdistan Region, according to a local security source.

The source told Kurdistan 24 TV that the 20-year-old woman, named Ayshan Ali Salih, deliberately ended her life by shooting herself with a firearm.

The incident took place on Saturday at 7:00 pm in the Kabarto II IDP camp, located in the province of Duhok. According to the most recent numbers publicly released by the UNHCR, the UN’s refugee agency, the camp is at full capacity with over 13,000 residents.

The source mentioned that she is from the village of Bara, located in the north of the predominantly Yazidi town of Sinjar (Shingal) in Nineveh Province, and that she fled to the Kurdistan Region in Aug. 2014 along with her family after the Islamic State overran the area.

“Her suicide was the result of a family issue,” security and relatives both told Kurdistan 24. The term “family issue” is also commonly used to describe reasons behind so-called honor killings in the region.

Over the past few years, several Yazidis in IDP camps in Iraqi Kurdistan Region were reported to have committed suicide.

The emergence of the Islamic State and its violent assault on Shingal in 2014 led to the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Yazidis. Most of them fled to the Kurdistan Region, while others resettled to neighboring countries in the region or in Western states.

Others were not as lucky and remained stranded in the war zone, where they experienced atrocities and mass executions at the hands of the extremist group for years. Militants subjected women and girls to sexual slavery, kidnapped children, forced religious conversions, executed scores of men, and abused, sold, and trafficked females across areas they controlled in Iraq and Syria.

The Yazidis are Kurdish-speaking but follow their own non-Muslim faith that earned them the hatred of the Sunni Muslim extremists of Islamic State.

On August 3, 2014, Islamic State group has captured most parts of Sinjar district in northwest Iraq, a home to around 400,000 Yazidis, after Massoud Barzani’s KDP peshmerga forces withdrew from the area without a fight leaving behind the Yazidi civilians to IS killing and genocide.

Thousands of Kurdish families fled to Mount Sinjar, where they were trapped in it and suffered from significant lack of water and food, killing and abduction of thousands of Yazidis as well as rape and captivity of thousands of women.

More than 6,800 Yazidis were kidnapped, of which 4,300 either escaped or were bought as slaves, while 2,500 remain missing, according to reports.

According to Human Rights organizations, thousands of Yazidi Kurdish women and girls have been forced to marry or been sold into sexual slavery by the IS jihadists.

In August 2018, the Yazidis representative in the Iraqi Kurdistan’s Ministry of Religious Affairs and Endowments disclosed that 1,102 Yazidis remain missing.

The Yazidis are a Kurdish religious group linked to Zoroastrianism and Sufism. The religious has roots that date back to ancient Mesopotamia, are considered heretics by the hard-line Islamic State group.

Some 600,000 Yazidis live in villages in Iraqi Kurdistan region and in Kurdish areas outside Kurdistan region in around Mosul in Nineveh province, with additional communities in Transcaucasia, Armenia, Georgia, Turkey and Syria. Since the 1990s, the Yazidis have emigrated to Europe, especially to Germany.

There are almost 1.5 million Yazidis worldwide.

Read more about the Yazidis

Copyright © 2019, respective author or news agency, Ekurd.net | kurdistan24.net

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