The UN’s High Commissioner for Refugees has recently released a video series interviewing women from the Yazidi minority group who have been attacked by ISIS. The series, hosted by UNHCR Special Envoy Angelina Jolie, is absolutely flooring.
Angelina Jolie interviewed women abducted by ISIS. The videos are shattering.
Zack Beauchamp is a senior correspondent at Vox, where he covers ideology and challenges to democracy, both at home and abroad. His book on democracy, The Reactionary Spirit, was published 0n July 16. You can purchase it here.
“For one hour a day they electrocuted me,” Sabreen, an Iraqi Yazidi woman captured by ISIS, tells Jolie.
Her four-year-old sister, Dilvian, was forced to watch. “I was crying and begging him to stop, but he wouldn’t listen.”
Watch all three videos at Joel Wing's Musings on Iraq.
The Yazidis are a small religious group, numbering about 600,000 worldwide, that’s overwhelmingly based in northern Iraq. After an ISIS offensive in August 2014 swept the heavily Yazidi Sinjar area, they targeted members of the group for slaughter.
The Islamists, who view Yazidis as devil worshippers, killed huge numbers of Yazidis, and trapped tens of thousands of them on a mountain (Mount Sinjar) without access to food or water. One of the initial goals of the US air campaign in Iraq was to help break the siege of Mount Sinjar, an objective Kurdish peshmerga finally accomplished in December.
According to Amnesty International, “hundreds and possibly thousands” of Yazidi women and girls have been sold into sexual slavery by ISIS. In one Yazidi village, Khocho, the UN reports that ISIS “gathered all males older than ten years of age at the local school, took them outside the village by pick-up trucks, and shot them.” Tens of thousands of Yazidis have been displaced.
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