ISIS targeting Yazidis to 'erase their identity,' UN says
The United Nations has declared that the Islamic State has been targeting Yazidis in Iraq and Syria as an act of genocide against the ethnic religious community.
In an effort to wipe out their existence, ISIS has "sought to erase the Yazidis through killings; sexual slavery, enslavement, torture and inhuman and degrading treatment and forcible transfer causing serious bodily and mental harm," the UN said in a recent report called "They Come to Destroy: ISIS Crimes Against the Yazidis."
No other religious group has experienced such atrocities at the hands of ISIS, according to the report.
The report also said that the Islamist terror group separates Yazidi children, particularly boys older than 12, from their parents and puts them under ISIS fighters to cut them off from religious practices in their community.
"Their past is deemed erased and all contact with their family and community is effectively cut off. Instead, a new identity is forcibly imposed," the report said.
This strategy has two purposes: to have more fighter recruits and to indoctrinate them to Islam, thus destroying their previous religious identity. Those who refuse to convert are put to death.
The women, girls and younger children had been forced to transfer to Syria, where they are still being held captive.
"Genocide has occurred and is ongoing. ISIS has subjected every Yazidi woman, child or man that it has captured to the most horrific of atrocities," Paulo Pinheiro, chair of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, said in a statement.
The report was based on Yazidi survivors' accounts of what they went through while at the hands of their ISIS captors.
Commissioner Carla Del Ponte said that ISIS has made clear its intention to wipe out the Yazidis, leading the Commission to conclude that ISIS is carrying out genocide against the religious group.
"Of course, we regard that as a road map for prosecution, for future prosecution. I hope that the Security Council will do it because it is time now to start to obtain justice for the victims," said Del Ponte, as reported by Reuters.
