Many Yazidis left to own fate after a year as ISIL hostages
IRBIL, Iraq — A year after thousands of Yazidis were murdered around their historic homeland of Mount Sinjar by ISIL jihadists, the woman who drew attention to her people’s plight has accused the world of abandoning them to their fate.
In an interview to mark the anniversary of the killings and the capture and mass rape of Yazidi women, Vian Dakhil, Iraq’s only Yazidi MP, who made a tearful plea to parliament to save the minority, said refugees were being forced to sell their few possessions to buy back girls from ISIL’s “slave markets.”
But thousands of women, girls and children remain captive, despite the aerial bombardment of ISIL positions by the U.S.-led coalition, including Canada. “The world has forgotten us,” she said at her family home in Irbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan.
Her own home in Sinjar was seized and destroyed by ISIL. “I know Sinjar was not the first town attacked by ISIL, but it was the first to have a mass kidnap,” she said. “We have a thousand people that no one knows where they are. And yet we are totally forgotten.”
Dakhil said that when 250 Nigerian girls were kidnapped by Boko Haram, there was a worldwide campaign to “Bring back our girls.” But when she wrote to U.S. first lady Michelle Obama to ask for help for Yazidi women, she received no reply.
“I have been to the European Parliament six or seven times. ‘Oh my God’, they say, ‘what a terrible story.’ And then they do nothing,” she said.