THE ANNIVERSARY OF THE YAZIDI GENOCIDE IN SINJAR

By Hasse-Nima Golkar

THE ANNIVERSARY OF THE YAZIDI GENOCIDE IN SINJAR:

Sinjar/Shingal; is a city in Ninawa province in northwestern Iraq, near the border with Syria. Most of the people in this area are Yazidi (a religious Kurdish ethnic group), but there are also Christian Assyrians and immigrant Sunni Arabs.

The terrorist “Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL/ISIS)” during its second offensive in northern Iraq on August 3, 2014 – after the withdrawal of the Kurdish Peshmerga (Iraq) captured large parts of the Sinjar area with the support of the Turkish state there massacred at least 7000 defenseless people of adults and children.

ISIS kidnapped at least five thousand Yazidi women as sex slaves and also took thousands of other people captive. This led to a mass exodus of tens of thousands of Yazidi residents who fled higher into the mountains where they lacked access to water, food, and protection from the strong solar radiation. An unknown number of people are still missing without a trace.

Counterattacks by Syrian Kurds YPG (People’s Defense Units) / YPJ (Women’s Protection Units) and PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party) guerrillas liberated parts of the area on August 8, 2015, managing to save from death between 35,000 – 50,000 of the refugees in the mountains. On November 14, 2015, with the help of US airstrikes, the city was liberated after 2 days of fierce fighting by the struggling Kurdish resistance movement against ISIS. In August 2017, the Yazidi of Sinjar declared officially an autonomous people’s administration.

We strongly condemn this brutal genocide by ISIS and defend the People Autonomous Administration of Sinjar/Shingal!

International Solidarity with the Yezidi people and their human right to self-defense is the duty of all freedom-minded people in the world!