Marking 5 Years Since IS Attack on Yazidis
Yazidi women and girls who were enslaved and raped by Islamic State militants have few choices. They may have been freed, but they can’t bring home the children they had with the extremists. Five years ago Saturday, IS militants launched attacks on Yazidi villages in northern Iraq, kidnapping, enslaving and massacring thousands. The attacks were labelled genocide by the United Nations. The attacks traumatized the Yazidis, an ancient religious minority who are no strangers to persecution throughout the ages. But the brutality of the IS onslaught posed major challenges to the community. Although the Yazidis are a monotheistic faith, IS viewed them as heretics and sought to annihilate both the people and their religious sites. FILE – Iraqi Yazidi women and children rescued from the Islamic State group wait to board buses bound for Sinjar in Iraq’s Yazidi heartland, April 13, 2019. In April, a month after the final military defeat of IS, Yazidi religious leaders made an apparent bid to protect the insular and still-grieving community by decreeing that they will embrace survivors of militant attacks. It was a move aimed at erasing the social stigma associated with rape. But in what appeared to be a response to …