UN: Yazidi genocide in Iraq still ongoing, unaddressed

ISIL’s genocide against Iraq’s Yazidis is still “ongoing” and remains “unaddressed” by the international community, the UN has said, marking three years since ISIL began killing and capturing thousands of members of the religious minority group. The UN human rights Commission of Inquiry, which declared the killings of thousands of Yazidis by ISIL, or the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant group, to be a genocide, said on Thursday that the atrocity had not ended and that the international community was not doing enough to stop it. “The genocide is ongoing and remains largely unaddressed, despite the obligation of states ... to prevent and to punish the crime,” the commissioners said in a statement.

Fighters were driven out of the last part of the Yazidi homeland in northern Iraq in May. However, most Yazidis have yet to return to villages they fled when the group overran Sinjar in the summer of 2014, killing and capturing thousands because of their faith.

Nearly 3,000 Yazidi women and children remain in ISIL captivity, and control over Sinjar is disputed by rival armed groups and their regional patrons.

Justice for the crimes Yazidis suffered, including sexual enslavement, has also so far proved elusive.

“The Yazidis’ wound is still bleeding,” one man told Reuters news agency at a ceremony attended by several thousand people including the mayor and other local dignitaries, held at a temple at the foot of the mountain that dominates Sinjar.