Human Rights Voices
While the UN devotes its human rights operations to the demonization of the democratic state of Israel above all others and condemns the United States more often than the vast majority of non-democracies around the world, the voices of real victims around the world must be heard.
U.N. Inaction on Islamic State
All Actions of the UN Human Rights System Critical of Specific States, 2014
An injured Yazidi boy
Islamic State, August 16, 2014
Dozens of Yazidis ‘massacred’ in northern Iraq
Original source
Islamic insurgents have "massacred" some 80 members of Iraq's Yazidi minority in the country's north, a Yazidi lawmaker and Kurdish officials said on Friday.
The news came as tribal leaders from Iraq's Sunni heartland offered their conditional backing for a new government that hopes to contain sectarian bloodshed and stop the advance of militants from the Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS or ISIL), which now calls itself the Islamic State (IS).
"They arrived in vehicles and they started their killing this afternoon," senior Kurdish official Hoshiyar Zebari told Reuters. "We believe it's because of their creed: convert or be killed."
A Yazidi lawmaker and another senior Kurdish official also said the killings had taken place and that the women of the village were kidnapped.
Yazidi parliamentarian Mahama Khalil said he had spoken to villagers who had survived the attack. They said the killings took place during a one-hour period.
The resident of a nearby village said an ISIS fighter from the same area gave him details of the bloodshed.
"He told me that (ISIS) had spent five days trying to persuade villagers to convert to Islam and that a long lecture was delivered about the subject today," said the villager.
"He then said the men were gathered and shot dead. The women and girls were probably taken to Tal Afar because that is where the foreign fighters are."
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