Genocide of Yazidis Continues
It was in the oppressively hot August Sinjar sun that an apocalyptic wave of contemporary barbarians engulfed 150,00 defenseless Yazidi civilians in Iraq in 2014.
The world took scant action as the barbarian horde known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant descended upon innocent men, women and children and indiscriminately unleashed murder and mayhem.
“The Islamic State summarily executed {an} estimated 5,000 males, hundreds of children, and about 86 women,” according to Yazda.org, a website dedicated to educating the world about the Yazidi genocide. “The group abducted approximately 7,000 Yazidis, mostly women, girls and children. Yazidi women, girls and female children as young as seven years old were all indiscriminately used as sex slaves.”
ISIL has used rape as a weapon of war. Women and girls are sold at slave markets; they even have price tags affixed to them.
“Yazidi male children were separated from their mothers, brain-washed and radicalized, and eventually used as children soldiers,” according to Yazda.
Depending upon the source cited, several thousand to 7,000 women and children remain in ISIL captivity, although the precise number remains unknown.
As part of its ruthless campaign, Yazda said, “The Islamic State destroyed every Yazidi religious site and temple in the territories they occupied. Yazidi homes and properties were looted and possessions of several generations were used. The genocide also forced an estimated 70,000 Yazidis to flee to Europe, mainly taking dangerous routes through the Aegean Sea in 2014, 2015 and 2016. A risky process that also cost hundreds of lives.”
The United Nations, United States and a host of other countries have recognized the persecution of Yazidis as genocide, as defined by the international Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
The convention states that “genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”
Those who have perpetrated this genocide should be captured and tried in an international court. The U.N. genocide convention lists the crimes that can be punished in an international tribunal: “genocide; conspiracy to commit genocide; direct and public incitement to commit genocide; attempt to commit genocide; complicity in genocide.”
When I took the equivalent coursework for a minor in college in The Study of Genocide, I never imagined that in 2017 we would have a world in which a genocide occurs.
