Local aid to victims failed: "Packets of food and water dropped from Iraqi helicopters this week broke when they hit the ground."
8/7/14, "Islamic State persecution of Yazidi minority amounts to genocide, UN says," CSMonitor.com, Jane Arraf, Baghdad
"Tens of thousands of Yazidis have taken refuge on a mountain in Sinjar province after Islamic State fighters overran their town and other areas, pushing out Kurdish paramilitary forces."
"Sunni Arab militants in northern Iraq are hunting down and killing large numbers of minority Yazidis, acts which amount to genocide, according to a senior United Nations official.
On Sunday, fighters from the self-declared Islamic State overran the city of Sinjar, part of a widening offensive that on Thursday saw IS [ISIS] take control of other Christian and Yzedi towns on the Nineveh plains. According to UN officials and Yazidi elders, the militants have killed hundreds of Yazidis, a secretive faith with pre-Islamic roots. Others have been taken as slaves. Tens of thousands have taken refuge on Sinjar Mountain, their traditional refuge over centuries of persecution, and are appealing for emergency aid.
Unlike Christians, who have been told they must either pay a
religious tax or convert to Islam to avoid death, the Yazidis are
considered by Sunni militants to be infidels who deserve extermination.
“We believe that what they have done may be classified
as genocide and a crime against humanity,” Gyorgy Busztin, the deputy
special representative in Iraq of the UN secretary general, tells the
Christian Science Monitor. “Regrettably the information indicates that
they are not even given the choice of life or conversion but they are
being treated as a group to be eliminated from the face of the earth.”
Busztin says the UN is still gathering numbers but it
believes hundreds of Yazidis have been killed while others, primarily
women, have been abducted and taken into slavery.
The
labeling the campaign against the Yazidi as genocide carries some weight and could spur international relief efforts. But it has no immediate
practical implications, nor is it likely to sway the militants in their
assault on other sects and faiths in Iraq and Syria.
Busztin
says the UN still needs to collect more data to substantiate the
allegations of genocide. He said there were isolated cases where Yazidis
were given the option to convert, as opposed to being killed for their
beliefs.
With
its latest offensive, IS [ISIS], which was formerly known as the Islamic State
in Iraq and the Levant (ISIS), now controls one-third of Iraqi
territory, including a 1,200 miles-plus de-facto border
with Kurdish-held territory. The Kurdish peshmerga, which has appealed for heavy weapons and US military
help, is now regrouping. On Monday, the Iraqi government, which is at
odds with semi-autonomous Kurdistan, launched air strikes on IS-held
targets in Mosul.
Yazidi elders say their men, armed only
with rifles, tried to hold back the IS fighters while tens of thousands
of men, women and children fled on foot higher onto Sinjar mountain – a
rocky outcrop without shelter or water. The United Nations’ Children’s
Fund (UNICEF) says
it believes at least 40 children died either in the initial attack or
from dehydration on the mountain. Photos posted on social media show
parents trying to bury their children beneath the rubble and rocks.
UNICEF says up to 25,000 children and their families are stranded on the
mountain.
"They consider us infidels so they are killing
us and taking away the women," says Vian Dakhil, a Yazedi member of
parliament, her eyes filling with tears after taking a call from a Yzedi
man who told her three of his five children had died on the mountain.
She says she spoke this week with one of several hundred women and
children held in an IS-run [ISIS] prison near the city of Tel Afar who told her
that small groups of women were being taken away in vehicles. On
Tuesday Dakhil broke down in tears in a parliamentary session in Baghdad as she appealed for help for her community.
Relief efforts flounder
.
Relief efforts flounder
.
The
US State Department says it is "actively monitoring the situation in
Sinjar.” While plans for expanded military support to Iraq contingent on
a new Iraqi government being formed, the US is exploring ways to get
aid to displaced Yazidis – including the possibility of US military air
drops to the mountainside.
Iraqi relief efforts to the
mountain have fared poorly: Many of the packets of food and water
dropped from Iraqi helicopters this week broke when they hit the ground.
With the water in plastic bottles not cushioned by wooden pallets
normally used for air drops, the bottles exploded upon impact.
“Please
tell the Americans and the Europeans and the UN we need help,” says
Ayid Rasheed, his voice rising in panic as he spoke from a phone charged
by a car battery carried up the mountain. “We are starving and dying of
thirst.”
Mr. Rasheed, speaking Thursday, said IS [ISIS]
fighters were now closing in on Shaikhan south of Dohuk – the site of a
shrine to a 12th-century saint that is one of the Yazidis holiest
sites.
Two years ago, Rasheed’s liquor store in central
Baghdad was bombed. Only Christians and Yazidis, who unlike Muslims have
no prohibition against alcohol, are allowed to sell liquor in Iraq.
Yazedis say selling alcohol is one of the few businesses which is open
to them.
Ethnically Kurds, the Yazidis' faith combines elements of Zoroastrianism
from ancient Persia, Sufi Islam, Judaism and Christianity along with
beliefs from ancient Mesopotamia. It’s a closed and still secretive
religion – members have to be born into the faith and cannot marry
outside of it.
Yazidis believe that God entrusted the
world to seven angels – the chief angel known in earthly form as the
peacock angel who refused to bow down before Adam. While Yazedis see it
as proof of his devotion to God, the narrative’s parallels with the
fallen angel have led some Muslims to accuse them of devil worship.
In
2007, al-Qaeda in Iraq, the precursor to the Islamic State, issued a
religious ruling calling for the killing of Yazedis. A suicide truck
bomb attack on a village in northern Iraq killed 800 people that year in
what is still the most lethal bombing of the war."
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Comment: Hey, I have a great idea! Why not elect another member of the genocidal Bush family!
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