Amnesty details Islamic State horror

The group that calls itself the Islamic State (IS) has carried out ethnic cleansing on a vast scale in northern Iraq, Amnesty International found in a report released this week entitled “The Islamic State’s Systematic Targeting of Minorities”, writes James Roberts.

Hundreds, possibly thousands, of members of non-Sunni Muslim communities – Assyrian Christians, Shia Muslims, Yezidis, Kakai and Sabean Mandaeans – have been killed or abducted since 10 June, the report says, with more than 830,000 forced to flee their homes.

The report documents numerous mass killings, of which one in Solagh village near the city of Sinjar is typical. A witness describes a white Toyota pick-up stopping by the house of “my neighbour, Salah Mrad Noura… The pick-up had some 14 IS men on the back. They took out some 30 people from my neighbour’s house. They put the 20 or so women and children in the back of a white Kia, and marched the men, nine of them, to the nearby wadi. They made them kneel and shot them in the back. They were all killed.”

The pattern of women and girls being abducted and subjected to rape and sexual abuse, while the men are slaughtered, is described in individual detail in the report.

On 24 August in Qaraqosh, Christina Khider Abada, 3, was sitting next to her mother, Ayda Abada, on a bus when IS terrorists snatched her. The mother followed her daughter off the bus, as the crying child was passed from one terrorist to another. The Islamists then pointed guns in the face of the mother and told her to get back on the bus or they would kill her. Qaraqosh fell on 6-7 August but Ayda Abada stayed when others fled because of her daughter’s blindness.

“The scale and gravity of the abuses demand a swift and robust response – to provide humanitarian assistance but also to ensure protection of communities who risk being wiped off the map of Iraq,” the report says.