Ultra-militants from the group calling itself the Islamic State (IS) have launched “a systematic campaign of ethnic cleansing” in Northern Iraq, according to a new report from Amnesty International.
The report, collating evidence gathered over the last few months as IS expanded its influence in the region, says that the militants have been carrying out war crimes including mass killings and abductions against religious minorities such as Christians and Yezidis.
“The massacres and abductions being carried out by the Islamic State provide harrowing new evidence that a wave of ethnic cleansing against minorities is sweeping across northern Iraq,” said Donatella Rovera, Amnesty International’s Senior Crisis Response Adviser currently in northern in Iraq.
“The Islamic State is carrying out despicable crimes and has transformed rural areas of Sinjar into blood-soaked killing fields in its brutal campaign to obliterate all trace of non- Arabs and non-Sunni Muslims.”
The report also includes firsthand accounts from survivors of IS’s atrocities.
Two of the deadliest incidents took place when IS fighters raided the villages of Qiniyeh on 3 August and Kocho on 15 August – both populated primarily by Yezidis. The number of those killed in these villages alone runs into the hundreds. Groups of men and boys including children as young as 12 from both villages were seized by IS militants, taken away and shot.
“There was no order, they [the IS fighters] just filled up vehicles indiscriminately,” Khidir Hasan, a 17-year-old student and survivor of the massacre in Kocho told Amnesty International.
Said, who also narrowly escaped death with his brother, Khaled, was shot five times; three times in his left knee and once in the hip and shoulder. They lost seven brothers in the massacre. Another survivor, Salem, who managed to hide and survive near the massacre site for 12 days described the horror of hearing others who had been injured cry out in pain.
“Some could not move and could not save themselves; they lay there in agony waiting to die. They died a horrible death. I managed to drag myself away and was saved by a Muslim neighbour; he risked his life to save me; he is more than a brother to me. For 12 days he brought me food and water every night. I could not walk and had no hope of getting away and it was becoming increasingly dangerous for him to continue to keep me there,” he said.
He was later able to escape by donkey and rode to the mountains and then on into the areas controlled by the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG).
Hundreds of women and children from these places and others have been abducted by IS, and there are severe concerns about their safety.
The report also identifies other ways in which IS is attempting to destroy religious minorities. From the report:
As part of its ethnic cleansing policy, the IS has also reinforced its message to ethnic and religious minorities that there is no place for them in Iraq by systematically destroying their places of worship and cultural heritage. Since taking control of Mosul on 10 June, the IS have systematically destroyed and damaged places of worship of non-Sunni Muslim communities. Among the first targets were Shi’a mosques blown up in Mosul and Tal ‘Afar in June; the same month, the Christian Tahira (Immaculate) Church in Mosul had a statue of the Virgin Mary removed from its roof. In July, the tomb of the Prophet Jonah in Mosul was demolished and, in August, the Shi’a Imam Redha Maqam (a Shi’a shrine) near Bartalla, the Yezidi Three Sisters Temples in Bashiqa and Sheikh Mand Temple in Sinjar, and the Kakai Mazar Yad Gar and Sayed Hayyas Temples in al-Hamdaniya were all destroyed.
