Three years ago, international attention was drawn to the desperate plight of Iraq’s Yazidis, a largely unheard of ethnic and religious minority. As Isis rampaged across their homeland of Sinjar in Northern Iraq in the summer of 2014, thousands of Yazidi women were kidnapped and taken hostage to serve as prized sex slaves by Isis members. Many of them still remain in Isis-held territory across the border in Syria.
Children were brainwashed and recruited to fight for the jihadists, while adults were massacred and left in the mass graves which now litter the mountainous northern districts of Iraq. Those who were able to flee did so to Mount Sinjar, whereon they were surrounded by the jihadists, and had to be rescued by dramatic helicopter airlifts which were televised across the world. So great were these crimes that the UN described them as genocide.
Three years later, on the anniversary of this recent genocide, the Yazidi struggle is far from over.
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