This was published 8 years ago
Yazidi genocide: Islamic State tried to exterminate religious minority
By Nick Cumming-Bruce
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Geneva: Islamic State forces have committed genocide and other war crimes in a continuing effort to exterminate the Yazidi religious minority in Syria and Iraq, UN investigators said, urging stronger international action to halt the killing and to prosecute the terrorist group.
The investigators detailed mass killings of Yazidi men and boys who refused to convert to Islam, saying they were shot in the head or their throats were slit, often in front of their families, littering roadsides with corpses. Dozens of mass graves have been uncovered in areas recaptured from the Islamic State group and are being investigated.
The investigators have produced 11 reports documenting wide-ranging crimes against humanity and war crimes committed by many parties to the 5-year-old civil war in Syria, but in a report released on Thursday, they invoked the crime of genocide.
They based their findings on actions taken by the Islamic State since August 2014 against 400,000 members of the Yazidi community, followers of a centuries-old religion drawing on many faiths.
"Genocide has occurred and is ongoing," Paulo Sergio Pinheiro, chairman of the panel, the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic, said in a statement.
"ISIS has subjected every Yazidi woman, child or man that it has captured to the most horrific atrocities," he told reporters in Geneva, using an acronym for the Islamic State.
"ISIS permanently sought to erase the Yazidis through killing, sexual slavery, enslavement, torture, inhuman and degrading treatment, and forcible transfer causing serious bodily and mental harm."
Those acts, he said, clearly demonstrated its intent to destroy the Yazidi community in whole or in part.
More than 3200 Yazidi women were still being held by Islamic State fighters, mostly in Syria, the panel found.
The commission on Syria has repeatedly recommended referral of the crimes to the International Criminal Court, but no action has followed from the Security Council, where Russia, a permanent member and the closest ally of Syria's president, Bashar Assad, wields a veto.