by WorldTribune Staff, June 16, 2016

Genocide against the Yazidi minority by Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (ISIL) is “occurring and ongoing,” the United Nations reported on June 16.

“ISIS has subjected every Yazidi woman, child or man that it has captured to the most horrific of atrocities,” Paulo Pinheiro, head of the UN Commission of Inquiry (COI) for Syria, said in a statement.

ISIL is holding Yazidis in conditions “that bring about a slow death,” the UN said. The terror organization also takes Yazidi children from their families and forces them to live with ISIL jihadists, “cutting them off from beliefs and practices of their own religious community,” the report said.

Yazidis, a Kurdish-speaking minority based mainly in the Sinjar mountain region in northern Iraq, are neither Muslims nor Arabs and follow a unique faith despised by ISIL.

The UN report said some 3,200 Yazidi women and children were currently being held by ISIL, mainly in Syria, where the females were used as sex slaves and the young boys were being indoctrinated and trained as fighters.

In 2014, ISIL massacred Yazidis in Sinjar and forced tens of thousands of them to flee their homes while capturing thousands of girls and women as spoils of war.

The COI’s report is based partly on interviews with survivors, and found that ISIL “sought to erase the Yazidis through killings, sexual slavery, enslavement, torture and inhuman and degrading treatment.”

The report said that men and boys over the age of 12 were separated from their families, and those who refused to convert to Islam were killed, while thousands of women and girls, some as young as nine, were sold in slave markets.

  Sinjar mountains, UN Commission of Inquiry, UN report charges ISIL seeks to exterminate Yazidi minority, WorldTribune.com