Yazidi politician in Iraq: What happened to my people was a genocide

ERBIL, KURDISTAN REGION, IRAQ – “In the beginning, the international community and many countries did many things and they sent humanitarian help for the Yazidi people and saved the Yazidis for three or four weeks. But after that it decreased and decreased and finished in four months.”

 

Speaking from her office in Baghdad, Vian Dakhil, one of two Yazidi members of the Iraqi Parliament, was one of the strongest voices for her community last year.

 

On August 5, 2014, she gave an impassioned speech in parliament begging for anyone listening to care about the massacre of Iraq’s Yazidi minority by Islamic State.

 

When Islamic State overran the area of Shingal and northern Iraq in August of 2014, it targeted Yazidis for extermination. Women were sold into slavery and given out to ISIS commanders in an unprecedented act of brutality.

 

Men were lined up and shot in the back of the head and buried in mass graves. Khairi Bozani, the head of the Yazidi Affairs Office of the Kurdistan Regional Government, says 3,400 women, girls and young boys are missing and 1,882 men and elderly women are believed to have been murdered by ISIS.

 

Read More: Yazidi politician in Iraq: What happened to my people was a genocide – Middle East – Jerusalem Post