Islamic State aims to eradicate Iraq minorities – rights groups

Islamic State aims to eradicate Iraq minorities – rights groups
By Kieran Guilbert, REUTERS, 27 Feb 2015

Islamic State militants have abducted, injured and killed thousands of civilians across northern Iraq and uprooted millions from their homes in a bid to eradicate the country’s ethnic and religious minorities, rights groups said on Friday. Several minority communities, including Christians, Yazidis and Turkmen, have been subjected to killings, rape and sexual enslavement, and women and children have been targeted in particular, a report by four human rights organisations said.
Islamic State seized the Iraqi city of Mosul in June last year while sweeping through the north towards Baghdad, meeting virtually no resistance from the army and declaring a caliphate in parts of Iraq and Syria under its control. Around 8,000 civilians were killed and more than 12,000 wounded between June and December 2014, the United Nations said.
Alison Smith, legal counsel of No Peace Without Justice, said Islamic State had committed war crimes, crimes against humanity and possibly even genocide against minorities in northern Iraq.
Iraq’s U.N. ambassador told the U.N. Security Council last week that Islamic State had committed genocide.
Sectarian violence across Iraq has worsened since June last year according to Mark Lattimer, executive director at Minority Rights Group, who said the abduction of thousands of women by Islamic State was “particularly concerning”. “Islamic State have sold Yazidi slaves to families in Mosul, which wasn’t hidden or kept secret,” Lattimer told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. 

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