Yazidi Nobel Peace Prize winner Nadia Murad calls for the inclusion of the crime of genocide against the Islamic State

Activist leads ceremony in Sinjar marking 10th anniversary of atrocities committed against her people by jihadist organisation

Aug. 3 (EUROPA PRESS) –

Activist and Nobel Peace Prize winner Nadia Murad led the commemoration this Saturday in the Iraqi city of Sinjar, birthplace of the Yazidi minority to which she belongs, of the tenth anniversary of the genocide committed by the jihadists of the Islamic State in 2014 with a request to the international community not to forget what happened and to incorporate the crime of genocide into the detained extremists.

On August 3, 2014, the jihadist organization launched an attack on Sinjar, in the province of Nineveh, in the north of the country and on the border with Syria, which marked the beginning of a genocide whose exact figures are still unknown and which marked the beginning of a decade of suffering for a group that still does not know how to return home.

A 2017 study by the medical journal PLOS Medicine estimates that between 2,000 and 5,500 people were killed and more than 6,000 kidnapped during the first few days of an attack that sent more than 400,000 people fleeing, forced to leave their loved ones behind, half of whom were children forced into sexual slavery or use as combat tools by the jihadists.

Most of the detained jihadists have been prosecuted under anti-terrorism laws and have not been convicted of genocide or crimes against humanity, meaning the crimes suffered by the Yazidis and other groups in Iraq have gone unrecognised.

“Ten years later, our community (especially survivors) continues to exercise resilience and rebuild their lives,” Murad said in a message posted on her social media account X.

In the same message, Murad calls on the international community for “more necessary than ever” support to ensure that the Islamic State is held accountable for what happened, and that the women and children still missing or in captivity “are rescued.”

It is worth recalling that the United Nations Investigative Team to Promote Accountability for Crimes Committed by Islamic State (UNITAD), the mechanism established by the UN Security Council to collect and preserve evidence of genocide, will close in September 2024 without a plan to continue this work.

However, the commemoration “sends a strong message to those who tried to expel us from our homeland and silence us through a campaign of genocide and sexual violence: they have failed,” Murad concluded.