The special UN Investigative Team probing ISIL atrocities in Iraq is making “real progress,” its chief said on Monday, as it begins to pinpoint the perpetrators of some of the worst crimes committed by the terrorist group during its years-long occupation of large swathes of the country.
New Urban Agenda guarantees rights of women and girls
Ethnic and religious minorities in Iraq, like the so-called Yazidis, face an “uncertain future” with the ongoing liberation of Mosul, a women’s rights activist has warned.
Ameena Saeed Hassan, a Yazidi from Sinjar in Northern Iraq, spoke at the UN’s headquarters about the persecution of her people by the ISIL terrorist group, also known as ISIS.
Many women and girls from the minority group remain in ISIL captivity where they are subject to “unimaginable horrors”, a UN human rights panel recently found.
Testimony from the survivors of atrocities committed by the ISIL terrorist group in Iraq has been described as “heart-wrenching” by the United Nations.
Over 300,000 people from the Yezidi community escaped from the city of Sinjar following an attack in 2014.
Many have detailed systematic and widespread killings, sexual violence and sexual slavery.
Alpha Diallo has been speaking to Ravina Shamdasani, from the UN Human Rights office (OHCHR).
Duration: 4'27"
A report setting out for the first time the systematic crimes of genocide against the Yazidi minority in Iraq, by the terrorist group ISIL, has been presented to the UN Human Rights Council.
Officially entitled “They came to destroy: ISIS Crimes against the Yazidis” the report was the subject of a panel discussion on the margins of the latest council session.
Extremists of the ISIL terrorist group have committed genocide against the Yazidi people caught up in the Syria conflict and the brutality is still happening, UN investigators said Thursday.
Paulo Pinheiro, who heads a UN Commission of Inquiry report into abuses in the war-torn country, said that “every Yazidi man, woman and child” captured by the group has been subjected to “the most horrific of atrocities”.
Documenting crimes committed by the terrorist group ISIL, or Daesh, is among the most painful tasks of the human rights section at the UN’s mission in Iraq, UNAMI, says the man in charge of that office.
Francesco Motta and his team have gathered testimony from people who have escaped ISIL’s control and have helped to connect them with medical and psycho-social support.
Survivors include women and girls from the Yazidis, a religious minority community, who ISIL have kidnapped and used as sex slaves.
Protecting Iraq’s “mosaic” of minorities is “part of our humanity”.
That’s according to Adama Dieng, the UN Special Adviser for the Prevention of Genocide, who has just returned from visiting those parts of Iraq where minorities are most at risk from violence, and even extinction.
He’s especially concerned that the methodical atrocities carried out by ISIL, or Daesh, against minorities such as the Yazidis in northern Iraq, are accounted for under international law, with the support of the Iraqi government.
We feel forgotten, say Yazidis battling sex-slavery
An activist helping girls from the Yazidi minority of Northern Iraq escape sexual enslavement by ISIL fighters worries his people are being forgotten. Thousands of members of the Yazidi community were captured and sold into slavery last year by the terrorist group. At briefing at UN headquarters on ISIL and its impact on women, the testimony from one young victim who had been sold into slavery, and then raped was particularly gripping. Matthew Wells reports: