Hundreds of Yazidis have said goodbye this weekend to more than a hundred victims of the extermination campaign against this religious minority that the Daesh terrorist organization carried out during its rule in northern Iraq from 2014 to 2017. The ceremony took place this past Saturday in the village of Kocho, in the province of Sinyar, where hundreds of people, including relatives and various personalities of the Yazidi culture, including the Nobel Peace Prize and genocide survivor, Nadia Murad, they have said goodbye to the 104 victims identified by the Foundation of the Martyrs of Iraq in 16 mass graves in the region.
The foundation, an agency funded by the Iraqi government, suspects there are more than 70 undiscovered graves in the northern region of the country.The Yazidis practice an ancient form of religion that combines elements of Zoroastrianism and the ancient Mesopotamian religions. This earned them the qualification of “heretics” by the Islamic State, a Sunni fundamentalist organization.
MASSACRE AND EXILE
At the time of the jihadist invasion, some 550,000 Yazidis lived in Iraq. Of these, some 360,000 escaped and found refuge elsewhere. Thousands of men were killed and women and children enslaved and raped in the invasion of the Islamic State, in what the UN considers an act of genocide. Last July, Amnesty International reported that some 2,000 Yazidi children who had survived brutal captivity still did not receive the care they needed and suffered from serious physical and mental health problems.
“Six and a half years ago, these people were left unprotected before Daesh, which attacked their dignity,” Murad lamented during his speech at the ceremony, in which he blamed Iraqi and Kurdish security forces for leaving their fellow citizens behind. at the mercy of the jihadists. For his part, Nawzad Hadi, an adviser to Kurdish President Nechirvan Barzani, described the return of the remains “of our beloved brothers and sisters” as “another sad page in a bitter history full of the suffering of the Yazidi people.We assure you that we will do much more and continue working with our Iraqi partners to ensure that the Yazidi religion is preserved forever,” he added, in statements collected by the Kurdish news agency Rudaw.
