IS ethnically cleansing communities in Iraq, says Amnesty

Fighters of the Islamic State have been carrying out ethnic and sectarian cleansing of entire non-Arab and non-Sunni Muslim communities in northern Iraq and committing war crimes, Amnesty International reports.

Summary executions, abductions, sexual assaults and enslavement carried out by these forces have forced more than 830,000 to flee the areas it has captured since June 10th, 2014. Most have found refuge in the Kurdish autonomous region where conditions are “dire” and the response of the international community has been “slow and inadequate”, states Amnesty.

Assyrian Christians and Shia Turkmen (ethnic Turks) and Shabak, Yezidis, and Mandeans had dwelt together in Nineveh province for centuries until Islamic State (IS) fighters invaded and seized the area. While a majority of members of these communities fled after the IS advance, many remain trapped.

The 27-page briefing, “Ethnic Cleansing on historic scale: the Islamic State’s systematic targeting of minorities in northern Iraq”, includes a collection of horrifying accounts from survivors of massacres who describe how men in the Sinjar region were rounded up and taken in pick-up trucks to be slaughtered on the edges of villages.

Amnesty gives the example of the August 15th capture by IS fighters of the small Yezidi hamlet of Kocho, with a population of 1,200, where 100 men and boys were slain and all the women and children abducted.

On August 22nd, at Qaraqosh, a main Christian town in this region, a three-year-old girl, Kristina Khoder ’Abada, was abducted by an IS fighter. Her mother told Amnesty that he “walked away with her in his arms. She was crying. There was nothing I could do.”

Amnesty says, “Hundreds, possibly thousands, of women and children, along with scores of men, from the Yezidi minority have also been abducted since [IS] took over the area.” The fate of the Yezidis is unknown although many of those who survived mass shootings “have been threatened with rape or sexual assault or pressured to convert to Islam”.

Amnesty gives examples where entire Yezidi families have been kidnapped and are being held in terrible conditions in Mosul and villages captured by IS. Children have died due to the lack of adequate food and milk. Teenage girls are taken away.

“As part of its ethnic cleansing policy, the IS has reinforced its message . . . by systematically destroying [minority] places of worship and cultural heritage.”

Speaking from northern Iraq, senior Amnesty figure Donatella Rovera said that the Islamic State has “transformed rural areas of Sinjar into blood-soaked killing fields in its brutal campaign to obliterate all trace of non-Arabs and non-Sunni Muslims”.

She accused Iraq’s government of “aggravating the fighting by either turning a blind eye to sectarian militias or arming Shia militias against the Islamic State” and called on the government to protect “all civilians regardless of their ethnicity or religion”.

The Amnesty report coincided with the adoption by the UN Human Rights Council of a resolution condemning the IS treatment of Iraqi civilians and a decision to dispatch a mission to northern Iraq. Last week the UN reported that the IS has been recruiting child soldiers, a war crime, in towns north of Aleppo in Syria.