UNITED NATIONS: The United Nations human rights office said on Thursday that the so-called Islamic State (IS) may have committed genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity in its attacks against ethnic and religious groups in Iraq.

It also calls on the Human Rights Council to urge the UN Security Council to address, “in the strongest terms, information that points to genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes,” and to consider referring the situation in Iraq to the International Criminal Court.

Compiled by investigators sent to the region last year by the High Commissioner, the report highlights violations, including killings, torture, rape and sexual slavery, forced religious conversions and the conscription of children.

ISIS’s attacks on the Yezidi population pointed to the intent of ISIS to “destroy the Yezidi as a group,” the report says, which “strongly suggests” that IS may have perpetrated genocide.

The report also highlights violations carried out by the Iraqi Security Forces and associated militia groups, including killings, torture and abductions, with some incidents pointing, at the very least, to a failure by the government to protect persons under its jurisdiction.

More than 100 people who witnessed or survived attacks in Iraq between June 2014 and February 2015 helped the investigation team compile its report, which cites brutal and targeted killings of hundreds of Yezidi men and boys in the Ninewa plains in August 2014.

Yezidi populations rounded up, with men and boys over the age of 14 separated from the women and girls. The males were led away and shot, while the women were abducted as the ‘spoils of war’. “In some instances,” the report found, “villages were entirely emptied of their Yezidi population”.

Yezidi female escapees described being openly sold or handed over as “gifts” to ISIS fighters. Witnesses described rapes of girls as young as six and nine years old and a scene where IS members sat laughing as two teenage girls were raped in the next room.

Boys between the ages of eight and 15 also described horrific experiences, as they were separated from their mothers, transported to locations in Iraq and Syria and forced to convert to Islam. They were subjected to religious and military training, including how to shoot guns and fire rockets, and were forced to watch beheadings.

“This is your initiation into jihad,” one boy was told.

“You are an Islamic State boy now.”

Christians, Kaka’e, Kurds, Sabea-Mandeans, Shi’a and Turkmen also suffered brutal treatment, the report says, citing the thousands of Christians uprooted from their homes in June last year, when IS ordered them to choose between conversion, taxation or displacement, and the 600, mostly Shi’a prisoners who were massacred by IS members.

Published in Dawn, March 20th, 2015

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