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A new report released by the United Nations constitutes the most detailed UN account of crimes committed by the so-called “Daesh” extremist group and sheds further light on “its mass enslavement of women and girls”, according to the Foreign Policy on Thursday.
In the Foreign Policy report on Thursday, it said that: “Daesh militants in early August swept into the Yazidi village of Maturat in Iraq’s Sinjar district and took women to the Badush prison in Mosul. Hundreds more women and girls were herded into an ancient citadel in the town of Tal Afar in the northern province of Nineveh.”
“From Tal Afar, a group of 150 unmarried girls and women… were selected and reportedly sent to Syria, the report said, “either to be given to ISIL fighters as a reward or to be sold as…slaves,” according to a report released by the United Nations’ human rights office in Iraq on Thursday.
The 26-page United Nations report — which documents rights abuses from July 6 through Sept. 10 — constitutes the most detailed UN account of crimes committed by Daesh and sheds further light on “its mass enslavement of women and girls”, the Foreign Policy said. Evidence was compiled by a team of UN human rights investigators inside Iraq, where most of the interviews with eyewitnesses were conducted in Erbil and Dohuk, it said.
The report added: “By the end of August, the UN documented the abduction of up to 2,500 civilians, mostly women and children, from the northern Iraqi towns and regions of Sinjar, Tal Afar, the Nineveh Plains, and Shirkhan. Once they were in captivity, fighters from ISIL…assaulted the teenage boys and girls, witnesses told the United Nations. Those who refused to convert to the groups ran the risk of execution.”
“[W]omen and children who refused to convert were being allotted to ISIL fighters or were being trafficked … in markets in Mosul and to Raqqa in Syria,” according to the report. “Married women who converted were told by ISIL that their previous marriages were not recognized in Islamic law and that they, as well as unmarried women who converted, would be given to ISIL fighters as wives.”
A market for the sale of abducted women was set up in the al-Quds neighborhood of Mosul, the report said.
“Women and girls are brought with price tags for the buyers to choose and negotiate the sale,” it added.
“Women and girls are brought with price tags for the buyers to choose and negotiate the sale,” the Foreign Policy wrote. “The buyers were said to be mostly youth from the local communities. Apparently ISIL was ‘selling’ these Yezidi women to the youth as a means of inducing them to join their ranks.”
Moreover, the UN’s high commissioner for human rights, Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, said in a statement accompanying the report’s release that: “The array of violations and abuses perpetrated by ISIL and associated armed groups is staggering, and many of their acts may amount to war crimes or crimes against humanity.”
The trafficking in slaves is only one facet of Daesh’s violent campaign to transform huge stretches of Iraq and Syria into a so-called “caliphate”, the Foreign Policy said. Forces loyal to the movement’s self-styled caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, have committed multiple mass murders of ethnic and religious minorities as well, it added.
The UN human rights office in Iraq enumerated a long list of offenses by Daesh, including “executions and other targeted killings of civilians, abductions, rape and other forms of…violence perpetrated against women and children, forced recruitment of children, destruction or desecration of places of religious or cultural significance, wanton destruction and looting of property, and denial of fundamental freedoms.”
The UN report stated: “ISIL has directly and systematically targeted Iraq’s various diverse ethnic and religious communities, subjecting them to a range of gross human rights abuses, including murder, physical and…assault, robbery, wanton destruction of property, destruction of places of religious or cultural significance, forced conversions, denial of access to basic humanitarian services … and [a] systematic policy that aims to suppress, permanently cleanse or expel, or in some instances, destroy those communities within areas of its control.”
Source: Al-Ahednews
