A United Nations commission ruled on Thursday that ISIS is committing genocide against the persecuted Yazidi religious minority in Syria, The New York Times reported.
“Genocide has occurred and is ongoing”, Paulo Sérgio Pinheiro, the chairman of the UN’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic, told reporters. “ISIS has subjected every Yazidi woman, child or man that it has captured to the most horrific atrocities….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.”
““Nothing has been done to save these people, and we hope for stronger action by the international community,” Pinheiro said, referring to the 1948 international convention that obligates countries to prevent genocide.
Investigators found that ISIS killed Yazidi men and boys who refused to convert by shooting them in the head or slitting their throats—often in front of their families—and leaving the bodies strewn by the side of the road. Mass graves have been uncovered in areas vacated by ISIS.
The commission also found that Yazidi women and girls, some as young as nine, were taken as sex slaves for ISIS fighters. Escape attempts or refusals to submit were treated with beatings and rapes. Children were sometimes targeted to punish their mothers. The UN report told of one ISIS fighter who killed a woman’s children after a failed escape attempt. The woman was then beaten and raped when she cried over her children’s deaths.
“No other religious group present in ISIS-controlled areas of Syria and Iraq has been subjected to the destruction that the Yazidis have suffered,” the report said.
The investigators for the commission have now issued 11 reports documenting war crimes and crimes against humanity committed during the five-year-old Syrian civil war. The report was produced through interviews with survivors, smugglers, medical personnel and others, and names individuals guilty of carrying out the persecution of the Yazidis, providing “a road map for prosecution,” said Swiss human-rights lawyer and commission member Carla Del Ponte. But despite the commission’s previous findings of war crimes in Syria, their reports have not spurred the UN Security Council to take action, as Russia would veto any resolution targeting its ally, Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. The commission found earlier this year that Assad’s regime was committing war crimes.
Hillel Neuer, executive director of the watchdog group UN Watch, issued a statement praising the report, but noted that “it’s late; we knew of the Islamic State’s mass killings of Yazidis and sexual slavery of Yazidi women for nearly two years already.”
“Because this finding was made only by independent experts and is non-binding, what needs to happen now is for the plenary of the 47-nation council to adopt a resolution before the end of the current June session that officially ratifies the determination of genocide. This is vital.” he added. “To make a difference and help the victims, the council’s resolution should urgently submit its finding to the UN Security Council for protective action, and to all of the state parties of the UN’s 1948 Genocide Convention, under which each signatory country has undertaken to prevent and punish genocide.”
The United States House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a resolution in March accusing ISIS of committing genocide against the Yazidi.
[Photo: Defend International / Flickr ]