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Syria Kurds return 25 Yazidis freed from IS to Iraq
QAZLAJOKH, Syria, April 13, 2019 (BSS/AFP) – Syrian Kurds on Saturday
repatriated 25 women and children from Iraq’s Yazidi minority after freeing
them during the final push against the Islamic State group, a local official
said.
The US-backed fighters say they rescued some 300 Yazidi women and children
during the fight to take the jihadists’ last scrap of territory in eastern
Syria.
“Today, we will hand over 25 people — 10 women and 15 children — to the
Yazidi council in Sinjar,” said Ziyad Rustam, an official with the Kurdish-
run group Yazidi House, which reunites rescued Yazidi children with surviving
relatives.
“They will be sent to their families,” he told AFP.
At the Yazidi House headquarters, women wearing colourful robes collected
children scampering around the compound before boarding busses bound for
Sinjar, the Yazidi heartland.
“The fate of my three sisters remains unknown… I don’t know anything
about them,” said 17-year-old Jamila Haidar.
“I hope we will be reunited soon.”
Iraq’s Yazidis are a symbol of the suffering caused by the Islamic State
group during its rein over vast swathes of Syria and Iraq.
The jihadists stormed through Iraq’s northwest in 2014 slaughtering
thousands of men and boys and abducting women and girls to be abused as sex
slaves.
But they have since lost all of the once-sprawling cross-border
“caliphate” to multiple offensive.
The Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces last month announced the defeat
of the IS proto-state after tens of thousands of people streamed out of the
jihadists’ last patch of territory, around the village of Baghouz near the
Iraqi border.
Rustam said SDF had in total liberated 850 Yazidi women and children
during its battles against IS since 2015.
But 3,040 Yazidis are still missing, he said, adding that the search for
them was ongoing.
Rustam said the jihadists had “sold many of them to people inside Syria,
in places like Idlib”, most of which is held by a former Al-Qaeda affiliate.
Some of the Yazidis extracted from IS’s last sliver of territory are being
held at the Kurdish-run Al-Hol camp, which also houses jihadist family
members.
BSS/AFP/MSY/1831 hrs