UN: Yazidis’ decision historic
The children of Yazidi women raped by Isis (Islamic State) men will be welcomed into the minority faith, a community leader said yesterday, allowing women taken as slaves by the militant group to return to Iraq from Syria.
Eido Baba Sheikh, son of the Yazidi spiritual leader Baba Sheikh, said the children of the formerly enslaved women will be treated as members of the faith, resolving one of the most difficult questions facing the community since Isis’ 2014 campaign to try to exterminate the minority.
The move was described as “historic” by the United Nations, which called it a “momentous step on the road to rebuilding their community, emphasising the innocence and dignity of children in conflict”.
Thousands of women and girls were forced into sexual slavery when the extremists attacked Yazidi communities in northwest Iraq. But the community shunned the women returning from captivity with children, a reflection of the deeply held Yazidi traditions to view outsiders with suspicion as a response to centuries of persecution.
United States-backed Kurdish forces defeated the last fragments of the Isis’ self-styled “caliphate” in Syria in March, raising the possibility that thousands of missing Yazidi women and children might be found and reunited with their families.
Some 3000 Yazidis are still missing. Many of the children enslaved by militants in 2014 were separated from their parents and given to Isis families for rearing. Boys were pressed into the militants’ cub scouts, given military training, and indoctrinated in jihadi ideology.
Officials at the Beit Yazidi foundation in Kurdish-administered northeast Syria said Yazidi women with children who could have returned to Iraq were choosing to stay in Syria, in order not to be separated from their children. Other women gave their young children up for adoption.
This week the Yazidi Supreme Spiritual Council issued a decree welcoming the survivors of slavery, and their children, into the community.