The United Nations believes that Islamic State fighters may have committed genocide against the minority Yazidi community in Iraq as well as crimes against humanity and war crimes against civilians including children.
In a report based on interviews with more than 100 alleged victims and witnesses, it called on the UN Security Council to refer the situation to the International Criminal Court for prosecution of perpetrators.
The report says says IS had "the intent... to destroy the Yazidis as a group."
Among the atrocities it says were perpetrated against the Yazidi community by IS, were the "brutal and targeted" killing of hundreds of men and boys in Nineveh province, northwest of Baghdad, in August 2014, the rape of girls as young as six, the abduction of women "as spoils of war", and the forced separation of families, with boys as young as eight taken to be trained as IS fighters. The reports adds: "In some instances, villages were entirely emptied of their Yazidi population."
A statement by the UNHCR said: "One witness described how two ISIL members sat laughing as two teenage girls were raped in the next room. A pregnant woman, repeatedly raped by an IS 'doctor' over a period of two and a half months, said he deliberately sat on her stomach. He told her: 'This baby should die because it is an infidel; I can make a Muslim baby'."
Tens of thousands of Yazidis fled villages in northern Iraq amid IS advances last summer. Many were killed, captured and enslaved, while tens of thousands were trapped on nearby Mount Sinjar, which was surrounded by IS fighters. Airstrikes led by the Unites States, and an offensive led by Kurdish peshmerga forces, helped break the stranglehold on Mount Sinjar.
The Yazidis are an ethno-religious group who prior to the uprising in Iraq have lived primarily in the Nineveh Province.
Last week, organizations representing religious minorities in the Middle East submitted a memorandum to the United Nations in New York City, asking that UN missions from various countries call on the UN Security Council to issue a resolution against the Islamic State terror group’s persecution of minorities and to take tangible steps to save those vulnerable groups.
