One of the big stories in the war against ISIS is their treatment of an ethnoreligious minority group called the Yazidis. Described as possibly genocide, the evil with which ISIS treats the Yazidis knows no bounds of human indecency and indignity:
An estimated 3,500 people, mainly women and children, are being held as slaves in Iraq by Islamic State militants, the United Nations said on Tuesday.
The Islamist group, which also controls large parts of Syria, is responsible for acts that may "amount to war crimes, crimes against humanity, and possibly genocide", particularly against minorities, a report said.
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The U.N. Assistance Mission for Iraq and the U.N. human rights office estimated that 3,500 people were "currently being held in slavery" by Islamic State, which seized mainly Sunni-populated areas in the north and west in 2014.
"Those being held are predominantly women and children and come primarily from the Yazidi community," said the joint report issued in Geneva, referring to a non-Muslim minority in northern Iraq viewed by Islamic State as devil-worshippers.
A little more about the Yazidis:
The Iraqi ethnic and religious minority descends from some of the region’s most ancient roots and face executions for a reputation as ‘devil worshippers’
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Estimates put the global number of Yazidis at around 700,000 people, with the vast majority of them concentrated in northern Iraq, in and around Sinjar.
[T]he Yazidis...have kept alive their syncretic religion for centuries, despite many years of oppression and threatened extermination.
The ancient religion is rumoured to have been founded by an 11th century Ummayyad sheikh, and is derived from Zoroastrianism (an ancient Persian faith founded by a philosopher) ,Christianity and Islam. The religion has taken elements from each, ranging from baptism (Christianity) to circumcision (Islam) to reverence of fire as a manifestation from God (derived from Zoroastrianism) and yet remains distinctly non-Abrahamic.
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Under Ottoman rule in the 18th and 19th centuries alone, the Yazidis were subject to 72 genocidal massacres. More recently in 2007, hundreds of Yazidis were killed as a spate of car bombs ripped through their stronghold in northern Iraq.
The outlook isn’t good; a New York Times piece recently reported (also referenced in the Guardian piece):
The rise of Islamic fundamentalism more broadly has pushed thousands of Yazidis to seek asylum in Europe. According to some estimates, 70,000 people, or about 15% of the Yazidi population in Iraq, fled the country. For a religion that does not accept converts and strongly discourages exogamy, the assimilation of Yazidi youth in Europe threatens the faith’s continued existence. “People have gone out of fear of attacks or fear of racism. This makes it hard to protect the faith,” said Baba Sheikh. [...]
For the past several years, Baba Sheikh, the Yazidis’ spiritual leader, tells me he has canceled the official yearly religious ceremony at Lalesh temple, the holy site of the Yazidis, out of fear of attacks.
ISIS is pure evil and savagery. Yazidi refugees, given the history of racist (the word applies since Yazdanism is an ethnoreligion, like the Jews and Druze) oppression, are ones who ought to be swiftly helped. Additionally, ISIS and their radical take on Islam and the views that are similar to ISIS’ on a host of issues need to be defeated. I thought slavery around the world was essentially dead. Sadly, I was wrong.