DAMASCUS, March 23 -- U.S.-backed forces said they had captured Islamic State's last shred of territory in eastern Syria at Baghouz on Saturday, ending the group's self-proclaimed caliphate after years of fighting. "Baghouz has been liberated. The military victory against Daesh has been accomplished," Mustafa Bali, a Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) spokesman, wrote on Twitter, declaring the "total elimination of (the) so-called caliphate". However, a Reuters journalist at Baghouz said there were still some sounds of shooting and mortar fire. The final battle lasted weeks as huge numbers of civilians poured out, and for many Kurdish fighters in the SDF, victory was sweeter as it coincided with their "Now Ruz" new year. Though the defeat of Islamic State in Baghouz ends the group's grip over the jihadist quasi-state straddling Syria and Iraq that it declared in 2014, it remains a threat. Some of its fighters still hold out in Syria's remote central desert and in Iraqi cities they have slipped into the shadows, staging sudden shootings or kidnappings and awaiting a chance to rise again. The United States believes the group's leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, is in Iraq. He stood at the pulpit of the great medieval mosque in Mosul in 2014 to declare himself caliph, sovereign over all Muslims. Further afield, jihadists in Afghanistan, Nigeria and elsewhere have shown no sign of recanting their allegiance to Islamic State, and intelligence services say its devotees in the West might plot new attacks. Still, the fall of Baghouz is a big milestone in a fight against the jihadist group waged by numerous local and global forces - some of them sworn enemies - over more than four years. It also marks a big moment in Syria's eight-year war, wiping out the territory of one of the main contestants, with the rest split between President Bashar al-Assad, Turkey-backed rebels and the Kurdish-led SDF. Assad and his Iranian allies have sworn to recapture all Syria, and Turkey has threatened to drive out the SDF, which it sees as a terrorist group, by force. The continued presence of U.S. troops in northeast Syria might avert this. Islamic State originated as an al Qaeda faction in Iraq, but it took advantage of Syria's civil war to seize land there and split from the global jihadist organisation. In 2014, it suddenly grabbed Iraq's Mosul, one of the region's great historic cities, as well as Syria's Raqqa, and swathes of land each side of the border. It declared an end to modern countries and called on supporters to leave their homes and join the jihadist utopia it claimed to be erecting, trumpeting its currency, flag, passports and military parades. Oil production, extortion and stolen antiquities financed its agenda, which included slaughtering some minorities, public slave auctions of captured women, grotesque punishments for minor crimes and the choreographed killing of hostages. Those excesses brought an array of forces against it, forcing it from Mosul and Raqqa in a year of heavy defeats in 2017 and driving it, eventually, down the Euphrates to Baghouz. Over the past two months some 60,000 people poured out of that dwindling enclave, fleeing SDF bombardment and a shortage of food so severe that some said they were reduced to cooking grass. Intense air strikes throughout the campaign have levelled entire districts and rights groups have said they killed many civilians, allegations the coalition has often disputed. A mass grave the SDF discovered last month showed there were other dangers in the enclave, though it has released no details on the identities of the victims or how they died. Civilians made up more than half the people leaving Baghouz, the SDF said, including Islamic State victims such as women from the Iraqi Yazidi sect whom the jihadists had sexually enslaved. Thousands of the group's unbending supporters also abandoned the enclave while still vowing their allegiance to a ruined caliphate and showing no remorse for its victims. At displacement camps in northeast Syria where they were sent by the SDF, the hardliners, including many foreign women who came to Syria and Iraq to marry jihadists, had to be kept away from other, often traumatized, residents. Their fate has befuddled foreign governments, who see them as a security threat and are loath to accede to SDF entreaties to take them back home. As the fighting progressed, the convoys of trucks from Baghouz started to include hundreds, and then thousands, of surrendering jihadist fighters, many hobbling from their wounds. The SDF said it captured hundreds more in recent weeks who tried to slip through its cordon and escape into Iraq or across the Euphrates and into the Syrian desert. At the end, they were besieged in a tiny camp full of rusting vehicles and makeshift shelters, pinned against the Euphrates and overlooked by hills held by the SDF. Islamic State released video from inside that squalid, shell-pounded enclave, showing its last fighters still shooting at the SDF as smoke billowed overhead. It was an attempt to shape the narrative of its defeat, portraying it as a heroic last stand against overwhelming odds and a call to arms for future jihadists. But in Baghouz in recent weeks long lines of abject, surrendering fighters sat or squatted in a desolate landscape, their dream of world domination in tatters.
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NEW YORK, November 28 -- The UN Council on Human Rights-linked Committee for the Protection against Racial Discrimination discussed the situation of religious and ethnic minorities in Iraq, Qatar and Honduras at a session held at the UN Geneva Office with the participation of international NGOs.
During the Iraqi debate, civil society group Minority Rights underlined how there are still religious and ethnic inequalities in Iraq. While the minorities in Iraq cannot benefit from the riches of the country, the group underlined that the religious and ethnic minorities in Iraq are in danger of attack. In a speech on behalf of the International Geneva Center for Justice, it was stated that the Iraqi government never obeyed international treaties to protect minorities. Emphasizing that the Iraqi government supports local militia forces that are violating human rights, the Geneva Center for Justice called on Iraqi government to ban violent videos in Iraq. Maat for Peace and Development and Human Rights, said that women in Iraq face great discrimination and violence. Iraqi government policies have actually strengthened attacks on women, and the two organisations called on the government to develop policies to protect religious and ethnic minorities, and particularly to protect women. It was also pointed out that everyone, especially women, targeted by DAESH should actually enjoy protection. Many international non-governmental organizations pointed out in their speeches that ethnic and religious minorities targeted by DAESH still live in a vulnerable situation. International NGOs said that the Yazidis who were specifically and violently targeted by DAESH, are still facing many dangers, and underlined that people who fled their houses due to DAESH attack still cannot return to them because of security reasons. The speeches also emphasized that Yazidis and women still live in a vulnerable situation of discrimination and called upon the Iraqi government to take action on this. KOCHO, October 20 -- When Islamic State fighters conquered the border region between Iraq and Syria, the Yazidi village of Kocho also fell into their hands. Fair Game Nadia has had three tattoos since childhood, each consisting of just one dot. She has one violet pinprick on the back of each hand and a dab of violet on the tip of the chin. They function as a kind of protection to ward off evil at key places on the body: on the hands, which are used to touch things, and near the mouth, so it can tell no lies. Nadia and her family are Yazidis, a monotheistic religion that most likely dates back to the Middle Ages and is steeped in mysticism. An estimated 400,000 Yazidis, making up approximately 5 percent of the Kurdish population, live in northern Iraq and Syria. Islamic State fighters see the Yazidis as idol and devil worshippers -- in other words, as scum, as they never tire of telling their prisoners. And, as far as they are concerned, Yazidi women are fair game. Islamic State fighters came to Nadia's town several times, always at intervals of one or two days. They were at pains to demonstrate their military strength, roaring into town and announcing that they were the new lords of the land. The men wore mirrored sunglasses, kept their faces masked with black scarves, and carried pistols and daggers in their belts, recalls Nadia. At first, they led the townspeople to believe that they were safe, as long as they handed over their weapons, mostly old hunting rifles and kitchen knives. They told the men of Kocho that disarmament was the price to pay they had to pay to avoid being killed by Islamic State fighters. After the weapons were collected and piled up on the back of a pickup truck, the jihadists herded the residents into the school. They separated the men from the women and took away the men in small groups. The women heard shots all afternoon and were paralysed with fear, says Nadia. Then the older women were separated from the younger ones. At the last moment, her mother slipped a gold ring from her finger and gave it to Nadia: "In case you need it," she whispered. This is Nadia's last memory of her mother. Islamic State fighters used SUVs and minibuses to drive a total of 64 young women, including Nadia, to Mosul, the city that IS had captured in mid-June. During the nine days in which Nadia was a prisoner of the "caliphate," they stayed in five different places, and with every move they took the young women along with them. 'We Remained Steadfast' The first house, Nadia recalls, belonged to a judge named Ghasi Hussein, who had fled the area, one of their captors told the young women. But in the future, as the man said, it will belong to them, in honour of Allah. Photos of the judge and his wife still hung on the walls, and he had had teacups printed with their likeness. The men and their prisoners stayed there for three days before they moved to a second, a third, a fourth and a fifth house. Nine days can be longer than an entire lifetime, says Nadia, but she can remember every second of those nine days. Sometimes they were given nothing to eat, other times just a putrid egg for six young women. For two long days, they received no water. It was extremely hot and their captors had given them a single glass of tea. They passed around the glass -- two tiny sips for each woman. If you convert to Islam, the men said, you'll be given as much fresh water as you want. "We remained steadfast," says Nadia. On another occasion, they were deprived of drinking water once again, only this time their captors put down a bucket of used bathwater. It tasted like soap and reeked of urine, but they had nothing else. Their captors beat them, sometimes several times in a single day, for no apparent reason. There was a man with a beard who used an electric cable, while two others preferred wooden switches. Sometimes they were also punched and kicked, and they were repeatedly sexually abused. Nadia doesn't give a literal account of these rapes. It is virtually impossible for her to talk about them, and it contravenes the conventions of her culture. She merely says: "We were taken individually to another room, to one of the men." Then she lowers her head, in silence, awash with shame. "What else could we do?" she says after a while, now speaking very quietly. She says the men were merciless. Some women threw themselves at their tormentors' feet, kissed their knees and hands, and -- eyes filled with tears -- pleaded for mercy. It was no use. The men remained unmoved. It only entertained them. Related article: Nine Days in the Caliphate: A Yazidi Woman tells (1) KOCHO, October 20 -- When Islamic State fighters conquered the border region between Iraq and Syria, the Yazidi village of Kocho also fell into their hands. Waking Up in Tears Nadia Murad-Pesse, 20, was born and raised in the Kurdish region of Syria by her mother Shama and father Murad. Her home-town of Kocho, which once boasted a population of 1,700, lies near the Sinjar Mountains not far from the border between Iraq and Syria. Some households in the village, including hers, had a TV and Nadia's favourite broadcasts were music shows and horror movies, as long as the good guys won in the end. She even saw a World Cup soccer match, Germany versus Brazil, but ultimately felt sorry for the Brazilians and couldn't understand why her brothers made fun of the losing team. Nadia has shoulder-length, dark brown hair with a touch of henna. Her shoulders are narrow, her voice is hoarse. She has scars on her forearm. She wrings her hands as she speaks and the words sometimes come haltingly, then pour out almost as a scream. It has been one and a half months since she escaped, but she still wakes up in tears at night, according to the relatives who have taken her in. Their home is located not far from the Iraqi Kurdish city of Dohuk, on the safe side of the front. During the interview, in which Nadia talks about her nine-day ordeal, she is repeatedly shaken by crying fits, but she no longer wishes to remain silent. She is determined to tell her story, a detailed eyewitness account of how she was held hostage. This past summer, Kurdish fighters in the border region of northern Syria and northern Iraq retreated before the rapid advance of IS troops. The fighters of the "caliphate," superbly armed and well-organized, seized control of large areas. More than 1.8 million people have fled the region, according to a United Nations report. From January to the end of September 17,386 civilians were wounded and 9,347 killed. In addition, Kurdish military officials estimate that thousands of young women were abducted. Amid all this turmoil, Nadia's town was suddenly left unprotected. On the night she snuck out of the house of her captors, Nadia found a protrusion along the garden wall and managed to clamber to the top. She was lucky in other ways, too: there was no barbed wire and no embedded shards of glass. It was pitch black on the other side of the wall. Far in the distance, she recalls, she could make out the dim, yellowish lights of a city. She was afraid to jump. But she did so anyway. Nadia landed safely and started running, quietly, but as quickly as she could. "Don't even think of running away!" the men had warned her. They claimed she would be recaptured within an hour, saying they had announced a reward for $5,000 (€3,950) for fugitives. The punishment for attempted escape, the men added, was death. Nadia had a happy childhood growing up in her small town. Her father died 11 years ago, but he left the family a spacious rambler, with four large bedrooms, in which the children grew up: Nadia, her 12 brothers and two sisters. Nine of her brothers, both her sisters, and her mother are listed as missing. Nadia shows a picture of her mother on her mobile. Nadia liked school and she was a model student, as she somewhat bashfully admits, finishing among the top two of her graduating class. History was her favourite subject. She dreamed of going to college someday, perhaps even becoming a teacher and buying an apartment of her own, with shelves filled with books. Her family was not rich, but they were able to make ends meet. They had around 50 sheep, two dozen chickens and a few goats. Nadia's older brothers worked as day labourers while her mother sold milk, yoghurt, eggs and cheese. Sometimes even Muslims from the neighbouring towns came to make purchases. They got along fine with the Christians, but her mother always warned her about the Muslims: "Never trust them!" Related article : Nine Days in the Caliphate: A Yazidi Woman tells (1) KOCHO, October 20 -- When Islamic State fighters conquered the border region between Iraq and Syria, the Yazidi village of Kocho also fell into their hands. Twenty-year-old Nadia was among dozens of young women who were abducted and abused. This is the story of her ordeal. During the ninth night of her captivity, Nadia seized an unexpected opportunity to flee. Back on the first day, the men who kidnapped Nadia and the other young women as hostages and sex slaves had away taken their shoes. Escaping barefoot was out of the question. As the women could see from the windows, the surrounding terrain was rough and rocky, and they would end up with bleeding cuts and gashes all over their feet. The house in which they were held captive had many rooms and the young women were frequently moved from one to another. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason for the frequent moves; they were apparently dependent on the whims of their captors. But in one room stood a wardrobe, inside of which Nadia found a pair of pink tennis shoes under some rags. Though they were a few sizes too small for her, they might just do. Six men -- her captors, rapists and tormentors -- stood guard from day one. But on the ninth night, Nadia noticed that four of the men were apparently absent, perhaps sleeping elsewhere. Whatever the case, only two of the Islamic State fighters were sitting in the kitchen that night -- and they were distracted. It looked as though they were arguing. The men had shut up Nadia alone that night and she didn't know where the other young women were. The lock on her door was defective and she was able to open it. She pulled out the tennis shoes that she had kept hidden, crammed her feet into them, slipped out of the room and was able to push open a terrace door. She scurried out of the house and rushed through the garden, filled with rustling dry bushes and trees. She was afraid that a dog would start barking, but she was lucky. She came to a wall, a high wall, so it seemed -- reaching beyond her outstretched arms. "Now I had to climb over the wall," she says, "and I didn't have much time." ROTTERDAM, August 31 -- Several dozen Yazidi women kidnapped by Islamic State in Syria and Iraq militants (ISIS) have been taken from Iraq to Syria, forced to convert and sold into marriage to militants, an activist group says. The British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) said it had confirmed that at least 27 Yazidi women had been sold for around $1,000 each to ISIS fighters. The group said it was aware that some 300 Yazidi women had been kidnapped and transported to Syria by the militants, but it had so far documented the sale into marriage of 27. "In recent weeks, some 300 women and girls of the Yazidi faith who were abducted in Iraq have been distributed as spoils of war to fighters from the Islamic State," a statement said. The group said it had documented several cases in which the fighters then sold the women as brides for $1,000 each to other ISIS members after forcing them to convert to Islam. "The Observatory documented at least 27 cases of those being sold into marriage by Islamic State members in the north-east of Aleppo province, and parts of Raqqa and Hassakeh province," SOHR said. It added that some Syrian Arabs and Kurds had tried to buy some of the women in a bid to set them free, but they were only being sold to ISIS members. The Observatory said it was unclear what had happened to the rest of the 300 women, and strongly denounced the "sale of these women who are being treated as though they are objects to buy and sell". Both U.N. officials and Yazidis fleeing ISIS advances in Iraq have said fighters kidnapped women to be sold into forced marriages. U.N. religious right monitor Heiner Beilefeldt warned earlier this month of reports of women being executed and kidnapped by ISIS militants. "We have reports of women being executed and unverified reports that strongly suggest that hundreds of women and children have been kidnapped – many of the teenagers have been sexually assaulted, and women have been assigned or sold to IS fighters," she said. Yazidis, a Kurdish-speaking minority who follow an ancient faith rooted in Zoroastrianism, are dubbed "devil worshippers" by ISIS militants because of their unorthodox blend of beliefs and practices. The ISIS emerged from the one-time Iraqi affiliate of al-Qaeda but has since broken with that group and espouses an interpretation of Islam that has been widely rejected. It has pressed a campaign of terror in the areas under its control in Syria and Iraq, which it deems an Islamic caliphate, carrying out decapitations, crucifixions and public stonings. In June, the group launched a lightning offensive in Iraq, overrunning parts of five provinces. In August, it captured Yazidi villages in the area of Mount Sinjar, prompting an enormous outpouring of the minority amid reports of executions and the abduction of women. Source: Agencies ROTTERDAM, August 25 -- These are the faces of six of the thousands of innocent Yazidi children who have suffered harrowing ordeals in Iraq this month.
He added that the abductions happened after residents tried to resist the IS attack, telling AFP: ‘Of course we tried to defend our villages, but they had much bigger weapons. ‘All we had were our Kalashnikovs. They executed 300 men, and took the women to their prisons. Only God can save them now.’ Their children, said Mr Solo, were rescued by the family. ‘But the women were in a house surrounded by IS. We had to escape. Now, the children cry for their mothers all the time. "Mama, mama," they wail. But there is no mama, we tell them.’ His comments on the dire situation came as Islamic extremists shot dead scores of Yazidi men, lining them up in small groups and opening fire with assault rifles before seizing their wives and children. A Yazidi politician cited the mass killing in Kocho as evidence that his people were still at risk after a week of US and Iraqi air strikes on the militants. Meanwhile, warplanes targeted insurgents around a large dam that was captured by the IS extremist group earlier this month. US Central Command said the strikes were launched under the authority to support humanitarian efforts in Iraq, as well as to protect US staff and facilities. Central Command says the nine air strikes conducted so far had destroyed or damaged four armoured personnel carriers, seven armed vehicles, two Humvees and an armoured vehicle. The US began strikes against IS a week ago, in part to prevent the massacre of tens of thousands of Yazidis in northern Iraq. They fled the militants by scrambling up a barren mountain, where they became stranded. Most were eventually able to escape with help from Kurdish fighters. IS fighters surrounded the nearby village 12 days ago and demanded that its Yazidi residents convert or die. On Friday afternoon, they moved in. The militants told people to gather in a school, promising they would be allowed to leave Kocho after their details were recorded, said an eyewitness and the brother of the Kocho mayor, Nayef Jassem. The militants separated the men from the women and children under 12. They took men and male teens away in groups of a few dozen each and shot them on the edge of the village, according to a wounded man who escaped by feigning death. The fighters then walked among the bodies, using pistols to finish off anyone who appeared to still be alive, the 42-year-old man said from an area where he was hiding. ‘They thought we were dead, and when they went away, we ran away. We hid in a valley until sundown, and then we fled to the mountains,’ he said. A Yazidi politician, a Kurdish security official and an Iraqi official from the nearby city of Sinjar gave similar accounts, saying Islamic State fighters had massacred many Yazidi men on Friday after seizing Kocho. All said they based their information on the accounts of survivors. Their accounts matched those of two other Yazidi men, Qassim Hussein and Nayef Jassem, who said they spoke to other survivors. It was not clear precisely how many men were killed. Iraqi and Kurdish officials said at least 80 men were shot. Yazidi residents said they believed the number was higher, because there were at least 175 families in Kocho, and few were able to escape before the militants surrounded their hamlet. Yesterday Britain deployed a US-made spy plane over northern Iraq to monitor the humanitarian crisis and movements of the militants. The converted Boeing KC-135 tanker, called a Rivet Joint, was monitoring mobile phone calls and other communication. Source: Agencies |
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