Yazidi UPDATES genocide has occurred and is ongoing

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Sadly there is almost nothing in the news about the Yazidis

They have been forgotten again

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The National

Yazidi girls train to take on ISIL from Sinjar mountain
By Jonathan Krohn

Mount Sinjar, Iraq // Seventeen Yazidi girls stream out of the wedding hall that serves as their military training camp and line up for inspection.

Their blemished faces highlight their youth: many appear no older than 13, though their instructor claims they are all between 15 and 22.

The young trainees are learning to fight with the aim of breaking ISIL’s siege of Mount Sinjar, the mountain in north-west Iraq where they live after fleeing the Islamist’s onslaught.

With most Iraqi towns at the foot of the mountain taken over by ISIL and the road to Syria also cut off by the militants, Kurdish and Yazidi fighters have struggled with a lack of troops to launch a counter offensive.

To fill the gap, the Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK) has offered military training to young Yazidis between the ages of 15 and 30 under the banner of the Sinjar Resistance Units.

Back at their barracks in Kursi Valley, located on the north side of Mount Sinjar, Qul Baher Said Hassan, one of the trainees, smiles shyly. “I like the weapons,” she says. Her classmates giggle. Qul Baher claims to be 15, though she looks much younger.

“Yes, we are the youngest fighters, but our hearts are big enough to fight,” she says.

Hader, a seven-year-veteran of the PKK who instructs the girls, says they are learning to be the “women of the future.”

“All these girls are like men,” she says, surveying her recruits.

Based in northern Iraq, the PKK has for 30-years battled neighbouring Turkey for Kurdish rights. Yet, since ISIL took over large areas of Iraq last summer, the PKK have trained their guns on the Islamist extremists.

In August, two months after ISIL launched its blitzkrieg across Iraq, they stormed into areas populated by followers of the Yazidi religion — one of Iraq’s oldest minorities.

The militants embarked on a campaign of persecution against the group kidnapping, killing, and enslaving hundreds of girls and women and sending thousands fleeing to the top of Mount Sinjar. Most have now scattered to safehavens across Iraqi Kurdistan. Some, however, have stayed to fight.

The PKK has three training camps for the Sinjar Resistance Units. There is a male training camp at one of the highest points on the mountain and separate training camps for male and female fighters in the mountain village of Kursi.

Each class of trainees consists of about 20 recruits and covers nine courses over a 15 day period.

The training includes learning to shoot an AK-47 and throwing hand grenades. Recruits are also taught the ideology of Abdullah Ocalan, the PKK’s leader who has been jailed on an island off Istanbul since 1999.

Hader says that it’s not uncommon for recruits under 18 to take part in the training.

For those as young as Qul Baher and many of her classmates, Hader says their families had given permission for them to be trained to fight.

When the girls are sent to the front they will be on the “second line,” according to Hader, learning from older, more experienced PKK fighters.

Already, part of the training involves visiting the battle field. “Sometimes we take the girls to the front lines to stand behind the guys on the front,” Hader says.

Qul Baher’s father, Said, a Yazidi politician, beams proudly as he watches his daughter, in full military fatigues, recite the well rehearsed rationale for why she and the others have become fighters at such a young age.

“All of the Yazidis are our family,” she explains, “Many of our girls were taken by ISIL. That is why we fight.”

There are about 200 PKK-trained fighters in the Sinjar Resistance Units.

In combat, the group is commanded by the PKK, though the Kurds claim the end goal is for the units to eventually function without their help.

Still, the Sinjar Resistance Units’ status as a franchise of the PKK has led to criticism of the group for not being a purely Yazidi organisation.

“[The group] is not beneficial for us, because their leaders are not Yazidi” says Sheikh Qassem Derbo of the Jelko, a Yazidi tribe on Sinjar. “Their orders come from the PKK.”

Following the visit by The National last month, the girls went on to complete their training, and are now stationed around Kursi. They are among the last to be trained due to a lack of new volunteers.

Hader is now the commander for all female Yazidi fighters.

She is routinely followed around Sinjar by a troop of girls giggling with shouldered guns.

http://www.thenational.ae/world/middle- ... r-mountain

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USA Today

Band battles Islamic State over Mount Sinjar in Iraq
By Jonathan Krohn

MOUNT SINJAR, Iraq — Kawa scrambles down the hill at a rapid clip in his ragged, knock-off Adidas Center Court III sneakers. His green kaffiyeh, tied around his head like a bandana, flaps behind him in the wind as he runs through the rocky, desert terrain at the foot of Mount Sinjar. He shrinks into a dot as he runs, hurtling into the distance past the sand dunes, his AK-47 rattling against his back, until he disappears into a cave.

Inside Kawa's cave sits a hodgepodge of men from a variety of backgrounds. Kawa is an Iranian Kurd and member of the armed wing of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) battling the Islamic State to regain territory lost in August, when the militants seized the surrounding area and brutalized the population.

His men include Turkish Kurds and local Yazidis, a religious sect persecuted by the Islamic State, as well as at least one non-Kurdish Turk, Ozgur, who is a member of the Turkish Communist Party.

Kawa's unit of 31 — including 20 local tribal members — is on the front lines of the fighting, about 2 miles west of the town of Sinjar, where they keep a watchful eye on Iraq's Highway 47, the only route under the Islamic State's complete control going directly from Mosul to Syria. The militants seized control of Mosul, Iraq's second-largest city, in June.

The Islamic State enslaved hundreds of Yazidi women and girls, looted houses and killed an unknown number of other Yazidis, sending the remainder fleeing to this mountain.

The two sides have fought to a stalemate, the front lines barely moving at all.

Highway 47 has been a key source of trade and logistical support for the militants. "They stole Yazidi stuff and took it to the Syria side," says Kawa, who will give only his first name, like most fighters here. "Sometimes we see them take weapons from Syria to Mosul and sometimes from Mosul to Syria."

Inside the cave, Kawa and his men listen to mortar shells ring out a few hundred yards away. Kawa talks about the new recruits the PKK has trained for the past few months. "They're good fighters," but training them is difficult because of cultural differences, he says. He says there are 400 PKK fighters in the area and 300 of the new Yazidi recruits. Both are represented here.

Down the road from Kawa's cave sits a boneyard of cars, trucks and tractors abandoned by fleeing Yazidis. It is the makeshift base of the 20 tribal fighters working alongside Kawa. They've been here since August, they say, and are quite bitter about what happened four months ago.

"We want to kill Muslims," says Salem Shamo, one of the tribal fighters. "We want to kill many. The more the better."

The sense of hate is palpable under the midday sun. That hate, combined with broad suspicion, has produced a feeling that no one else is to be trusted. "Nobody is going to benefit the Yazidi people besides Yazidis," says Haider Hassan, another tribal fighter.

The PKK forces, along with the Yazidis they've trained and the tribal fighters, man four outposts along the hill. From one of the outposts, a tribal fighter looks through binoculars. Across the street, he sees a building he says is the Islamic State's local base.

Two days ago, Kawa says, he led a raid on one of the nearby checkpoints. A round goes off, aimed at another outpost. "Sometimes IS shoots us, sometimes we shoot them," Kawa says.

The coalition with the tribal fighters here is not unique. All around Sinjar, tribal fighters have teamed up with the PKK and the Yazidis they've trained.

Even with such cooperation, the alliance can't break the siege. The head of PKK forces on the mountain, who goes by the nom de guerre Agid, ("hero" in Kurdish), says regaining control of the northern corridor between Sinjar and Syria is the next goal, but there aren't enough troops.

"We could do it in one day," he says, "but we need more troops to hold it."

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/worl ... /19964325/

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npr

For Yazidi Women, Escaping ISIS Doesn't Mean The Ordeal Is Over
Leila Fadel


Many Yazidis, like the ones shown here, managed to flee the onslaught of the so-called Islamic State and made their way to relative safety, like this camp near the northern Iraqi border crossing of Zakho. However, some 5,000 Yazidis, many of them women, are still being held hostage by the Islamic State.

Barzan is a young Yazidi man, with sad blue eyes. His mother, five of his sisters and his niece are being held by the so-called Islamic State, taken when the extremist group swept through the Sinjar area of northern Iraq in August.

They are seven of some 5,000 Yazidis still being held by the extremist Sunni group. The Iraqi women are enslaved and sold for sex.

His sixth sister is home with him now. She is just 15 and she was raped. To protect her identity we're only using Barzan's first name.

"She told me they held her hands down and they raped her once. She could barely tell me the story, she just cried and cried," he said, speaking to us in a strip mall in the northern Iraqi city of Dohuk.

It's an extremely rare admission in a community whose entire fabric has been shredded by this tragedy.

The Yazidis, a small ethno-religious minority concentrated in Iraq's north, already were a conservative, insular community. Now, families are torn between empathy for the suffering women and generations of tribal codes of honor that have never faced such a test.

Even if ISIS is defeated tomorrow, the women will suffer the aftermath of sexual trauma. And children born from these rapes will have an unknown fate.

Barzan's sister is not pregnant. But he worries about the others who are still missing.

"If all of them come back and all of them were pregnant, it's not their fault," he said. "Even if my sisters want to have the baby it's OK; if she wants to have an abortion it's also OK. I will take care of the child."

But he knows others won't be as accepting in a country where the ideas of honor and shame are so entrenched.

Also, abortion is illegal in Iraq unless a woman's life is endangered by giving birth. So women resort to clandestine abortions from doctors willing to do them illegally.

It's what he'll do, he says, if he has to.

It's a problem that no one really wants to talk about. The community does discuss the nightmare that ISIS has unleashed on it: massacres and rapes of girls and women.

But many of the girls who are returning from captivity deny rape, at least publicly, telling stories of fighting off their captors. Activists do acknowledge privately that women are coming back pregnant, but it's rare for anyone to acknowledge it publicly.

Ambivalence Toward Traumatized Women

Khalida Khalid is a Yazidi adviser to the speaker of the Parliament in the autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq. She is working on the cases and says there have been instances of pregnancy. But no one wants to talk about it outside the community, she says.

"The Kurdish community is conservative and within that circle is the Yazidi community and that is even more conservative," she says.

It's also a traumatized minority that has faced mass displacement by ISIS and feels betrayed by both Arab and Kurdish Muslims.

Khalid says the women who have escaped ISIS need protection when they return. The estimated number of escapees varies from 50 to nearly 300 women and girls.

"As a community we have societal rules. Some of these families have accepted the reality, the de facto situation they've been put in," she says. "We're more concerned about what will happen later to these women, will they face discrimination or violence from their families."

The Kurdish Parliament in the autonomous north is discussing laws that would protect them. One would legalize abortions for victims of rape by ISIS.

"It's very difficult to have the babies of terrorists," Khalid says. "People can't accept that."

Nayef al-Mandekan agrees. He is a leader of a tribe that has suffered greatly: In one village, 420 members of his tribe were killed, including his four sons and his brother.

He is now displaced, living in Dohuk in a home that he has opened to survivors from his tribe, including seven young women and girls who escaped ISIS.

He speaks to us in his formal living room with the seven young women nearby. They look down and say very little but do say they were able to fight off attempts at rape by their captors.

"The women who come back are innocent. They did nothing wrong; they were raped," Mandekan says. "We will accept them."

But when it comes to pregnancy, that's something he and his tribe cannot accept, he says.

In this case, abortion would be preferable.

He is uncomfortable discussing the topic and ends the conversation.

"It's too early to discuss these things, there are no cases of this in this room," he says. "Every tribe and every family will have to make their own decisions."

Dealing With Issues Of Honor And Shame

Right now, publicly, Yazidi leaders are saying all the right things — the women will be welcomed back as innocent victims, they will not be shunned or punished.

But already, health authorities are administering so-called virginity tests to Yazidi women who return from captivity. Kurdish officials say they're voluntary and done at the request of the victim or by the court as part of an effort to document what they're calling a genocide against Yazidis.

But health and rights groups call the tests scientifically useless and traumatic for rape victims. They also worry that the tests could be used against women who don't want to acknowledge the rape to their family or community out of shame or fear.

"Virginity tests can re-traumatize the victims," says Sherizaan Minwalla, women's protection and empowerment coordinator at the International Rescue Committee. She is based in Irbil.

"These are women and girls who have suffered, in many cases, sexual violence. And even if they haven't, it's an assault on their body really, it's invasive, and many of them may not want to have it done but may feel pressure to in order to prove that they haven't been raped."

She says issues of honor and shame dominate the Yazidi and larger Iraqi society.

So far, there has been no documentation of violence against these women and girls. And in every interview, activists, Yazidi families and officials say the women who escaped are embraced when they return.

But Minwalla says a few have been ostracized. She worries that as more escape or are freed, they could come back and face a life of rejection or scorn from their own communities.

"They feel like they can't hold their heads up," she says. "Some are refusing to go live in the [displacement] camps because they don't want the whole community looking at them and talking about them and making them feel bad about themselves. It's very hard for them to re-integrate."

http://www.npr.org/blogs/parallels/2014 ... al-is-over

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1876 Yazidi Kurd



Russian: M. Mikeshin. Types from the Caucasus and Asia Minor. From left to right: two-Kurd chertopoklonnika, Kabardian, Chechen, Kurds Mohammedan from the vicinity of Van. Figure 1876.

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Islamic State 'are all monsters' says 14 year old Yazidi boy

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BBC News

Mount Sinjar: Yazidis' tales of survival as thousands cling on for life



Months after thousands of Iraqi Yezidis threatened by Islamic State (IS) militants escaped to safety from Mount Sinjar, the BBC's Nafiseh Kohnavard has gained rare access to the mountain, where thousands more civilians who did not flee are still trapped.

IS fighters have surrounded the area again, leaving many families with little access to food or water.


Four months since the US and Britain provided aid to those stranded, those that remain rely on Iraqi helicopters for life-saving provisions and rescue.

The people face regular attacks by IS but have few heavy weapons to defend themselves.

Follow the link to hear the yazidis own words

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-30440514

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It is winter
The temperature has fallen
I close my double glazed windows
Draw my thick curtains
Turn up my central heating
Have a lovely hot meal

CRY FOR THE YAZIDIS

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Mail Online

Surrounded by ISIS and forgotten by the world, but thousands of Yazidis STILL need rescue from Mount Sinjar as militants close in
By Ollie Gillman

Thousands of Yazidis are still trapped on Mount Sinjar, almost completely surrounded by ISIS militants
ISIS cornered 50,000 in August but U.S. airstrikes held them off while Iraqi forces secured most Yazidis' rescue
But four months on, they are long-forgotten and the Islamic extremists are closing in on them once more
Around 8,000 men, women and children are said to be trapped on top of Mount Sinjar as the cold of winter bites
A handful of those trapped have been helicoptered to UN refugee camps but others rely on aid drops to survive

Thousands of Yazidis are still trapped on Mount Sinjar, almost completely surrounded by ISIS who lurk at the bottom of the ridge in northern Iraq.

As ISIS cornered 50,000 Yazidis atop the mountain back in August, threatening them with genocide and the rape of their women, President Barack Obama ordered U.S. airstrikes on the Islamic extremists while the UK dropped aid to those in need.

But just four months later, the world has moved on, forgetting about the plight of the 8,000 men, women and children who are still trapped on Mount Sinjar, with just a handful rescued in the last few weeks.

Despite U.S. and Iraqi airstrikes, ISIS militants still control the foot of the mountain, except in the western village of Bara where government forces are reported to be back in control.

Syrian-Kurdish fighters had kept a corridor open next to the 45-mile ridge, allowing Yazidis to flee to safety, but an ISIS offensive re-captured the escape route.

While ISIS are kept at bay for the time being, may fear the few Iraqi aid supply drops that can get through to the Yazidis may not be enough to see them through the cold of winter.

The only chance for the trapped Yazidis to escape is via helicopters from the Iraqi Air Force, which has been able to rescue many from Mount Sinjar, dropping them at a UN refugee camp in Faysh Khabur, on the Syrian border.

Since the extremists' attack in August, 5,000 Yazidis have been killed on Mount Sinjar, with a further 7,000 women and girls kept as sex slaves.

Some of the killings were brutally simplistic, with people lined up at checkpoints, shot dead, then bulldozed into mass graves. Others were herded into temples which were later blown up.

UN researchers said hundreds more men had been killed for refusing to convert to Islam.

Tens of thousands of Yazidis fled into the Sinjar Mountains after the militant onslaught on Sinjar, part of ISIS' lightning advance into north and western Iraq.

Iraq's Human Rights Ministry said at the time that hundreds of women were abducted by the militants, who consider the Yazidis, a centuries-old religious minority, a heretical sect.

Human Rights Watch said ISIS 'separated young women and teenage girls from their families and has forced some of them to marry its fighters'.

One woman told the organisation that she saw Islamic State fighters buying girls, and a teenage girl said a fighter bought her for $1,000.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... -ISIS.html

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Drawings of the Yazedi people by war artist Jane Adams.

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YAZIDI

Yazidis believe that the One Supreme God created the world and placed it in the care of seven divine, angelic beings (angels). The chief of these divine beings is Melek Taus whom we believe lives among us today. He is symbolically represented by a peacock and is not worshipped as a "god". Despite what non-Yazidis and other uninformed persons have said or written, Yazidis are not "devil worshippers."

Our religion is monotheistic, meaning that we worship only One God. Our very name "Yazidi" mean "worshiper of God." We believe that Melek Taus (Tawus Melek), the chief of the angelic beings, is his messenger and caretaker of the earth. We believe that the God we worship is the same God worshipped by other monotheistic religions such as Judaism and Christianity. We do not believe in trying to convert people to our religion. Our doors are open to learn more about us - our religion and history, but we don't encourage conversion.

We have the highest respect for the religious reformer Sheikh Adi. He died in 1162. Many Yazidis make pilgrimages to his tomb as a religious practice. Sheikh Adi often read and spoke about Christ, whom he called "Isa," and following his practice, we too highly respect Isa and believe he was sent by God to Israel. In our daily prayers we repeat "There is no Mahdi but Isa" (in other words, "There is Only One Guide and He is Isa"). Many Yazidis believe that Melek Taus was sent by God to move the stone from Isa's tomb and remained there for a period of time. We love the land in which Isa was born and believe God has wonderful plans for its future despite the turmoil in that geographic region of the world.

While some of us speak Kurdish, we consider ourselves to be a distinct ethnic group. We are not Muslim and our religion is not Islam. Our religion pre-dates Islam. The American Yazidi Council does not promote so called "mercy killings" and believes that such acts do nothing but tarnish our religion in the eyes of the modern world. Instead, we advocate a more humane treatment concerning those who do not abide by the ancient practices of our religion, such as counseling and forgiveness, and as a last result, banishment for those who are found guilty but show now repentence.

Our people have been persecuted for many, many centuries, mostly by Muslims. Under Saddam Hussein, we were victimized as "Kurds" and as a non-Muslim minority. Our people still suffer under Sunni Muslim religious adherants and by the terrorists organization known as "ISIS" or the "Islamic State." We respect all peace loving religions such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism and others.

There are more than half a million Yazidis worldwide, mostly in hiding because of fear of their enemies. There are peaceful Yazidi communities living in the United States, Europe and abroad. Yazidis respect the laws of the lands in which they reside and promote peaceful and conservative moral ideals but do not judge based on race, color, religion or ethnicity. We call for an end to terrorism in any form. Yazidis are extremely grateful to American soldiers for protecting them in times of persecution.

While we are a very poor people, we believe in working for a living and we encourage our people not to rely on government subsidies and housing or other such funds when possible. We believe in individual freedom for every single living human being and each person should have the right to make a living for themselves.

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http://yazidi.org/

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Children of the Sun: Kurdish Yezidis

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interview with Yezidi leader Mirza Ismail who discusses the mysterious ancient history of the Yezidis and their current dilemma.

Unless the US Troop withdrawal date is extended past the end of 2011 the Yezidis could face full scale genocide at the hands of Moslem terrorists.

Knowing that the Yazidis were at risk of full scale genocide America left them to die

The History and Genocide of the Yezidis Part 1

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The History and Genocide of the Yezidis Part 2

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The History and Genocide of the Yezidis Part 3

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The History and Genocide of the Yezidis Part 4

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Mount Sinjar is about to be liberated

WHY HAS IT TAKEN SO MANY MONTHS ?



WHY HAS NOBODY FREED THOSE KIDNAPPED ?