(New York, N.Y.) — On Monday, United Nations (U.N.) investigators declared the ISIS offensive in 2014 against the Yazidi religious minority in Iraq an act of genocide. Citing “clear and compelling evidence,” the U.N. concluded that ISIS developed chemical weapons and used mustard gas against the Yazidis and engaged in the mass killing of thousands of Yazidi civilians. Karim Kahn, head of the U.N. investigation team, said that with clear evidence, ISIS attempted “to destroy the Yazidi, physically and biologically,” and that it mandated that the minority group convert or be killed. Today, ISIS continues to carry out crimes against the Yazidis, with thousands of Yazidi women and children still separated from their families or missing.
Earlier this year, the Counter Extremism Project (CEP) launched a report and hosted a webinar titled Western Foreign Fighters and the Yazidi Genocide. Both the report, authored by authored by CEP Strategic Advisor Liam Duffy, and webinar highlighted the Yazidi survivors’ ongoing fight for justice and the underexplored role of Westerners in the atrocities of the Yazidi genocide.
The crimes committed by ISIS represent one of the clearest examples of genocide committed in recent memory. The campaign was a carefully orchestrated, pre-planned, and systematic attempt to destroy a minority community, through mass executions of men of fighting age and the mass kidnapping and trafficking of Yazidi women and children into slavery as the ‘spoils of war’. More than 3,000 Yazidis are thought to have been killed in the initial assault, many in mass executions, with almost 7,000 Yazidi women and children kidnapped and enslaved throughout ISIS’s so-called caliphate. Apart from the human atrocities, in a textbook campaign of ethnic cleansing, ISIS embarked on the intentional destruction of Yazidi spiritual, cultural sites and temples in Sinjar and Bashiqa-Bahzani. A total of 68 Yazidi temples, shrines, and cultural sites were destroyed.
To read CEP’s report Western Foreign Fighters and the Yazidi Genocide, please click here.
To watch the webinar launching CEP’s report, please click here.
To read CEP’s ISIS resource, please click here.