Yazidi Survivors Are Key to Bringing Islamic State Members to Justice By Bojan Pancevski
https://www.wsj.com/articles/yazidi-survivors-are-key-to-bringing-islamic-state-members-to-justice-11577882496
Efforts to compile testimonies from Yazidi victims offer first-hand evidence of genocide committed by the self-styled caliphate
BERLIN—Ivana says she was eight years old when she was sold as a sex slave to an American member of Islamic State after the group murdered her parents.
Five years after the terror militia sought to exterminate her fellow Yazidi, a religious minority in Iraq and Syria, Ivana’s testimony and those of hundreds of other victims offer evidence that might help bring Islamic State members to justice in the West.
European and U.S. authorities have struggled to successfully prosecute returning Islamic State members, largely because of the difficulties in collecting evidence of crimes that happened in Iraq and Syria.
But the Yazidi who survived carry detailed accounts of one of the militia’s worst crimes: The attempt to wipe out the religious minority and the mass enslavement of its women and female children. Islamic State interprets Islamic scriptures literally, using them to justify the murder and enslavement of Yazidis, who are adherents of an ancient religion that is neither Muslim, Christian nor Jewish and therefore perceived as subhuman by ideologues of the terror group. Now lawyers, activists and the United Nations are compiling these accounts to build cases against captured militants from the self-styled caliphate.
“He was horribly brutal. He and his wife owned me and another two Yazidi girls,” Ivana, now aged 13, says in a documentary about Yazidi survivors. The film, by a German-Yazidi lawyer, will premiere at the United Nations’ New York headquarters in January and is part of the documentation effort. CONTINUE AT SITE
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