Mass Ethnic Cleansing in Iraq: Religious Minorities are Being Slaughtered and ISIS Just Captured the Last Town Giving Them Shelter

Screen capture from YouTube video.

By Andrew Slater
ISIS just captured the Iraqi town of Sinjar in the first major defeat of Kurdish forces. Religious groups that had taken refuge there are in imminent danger of being massacred.

In a major defeat for Kurdish forces the Iraqi town of Sinjar was captured Sunday by the group known as ISIS, now calling itself the Islamic State. This is the Kurds first major loss to ISIS and a catastrophe for the religious minorities who had taken refuge in the area and are now at imminent risk of being slaughtered.

Reports from the region describe an unfolding tragedy with young women being abducted, religious monuments destroyed, and the ISIS flag now hanging over government buildings.

Without Western champions and sympathizers, the non-Christian religious minorities of Nineveh province are being slowly exterminated, driven off, or forced into hiding.

The Sinjar mountain area is a ring of villages and one of the few true homes for the Yezidi people. The Yezidi’s ancient faith, which combines elements of Christianity, Sufi Islam, and Zoroastrianism, is considered heretical by ISIS and puts them at great risk. Of the 300,000 who live in this district, most have left in the last 24 hours and the rest are desperately trying to find a way out with aid organizations in Iraq saying that a humanitarian disaster of epic scale is currently unfolding.

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The fall of Sinjar is made worse by the fact that it had been the refuge point for thousands of Yezidis, Shabak, and Shia—who are in the minority in northern Iraq—and others who fled the fall of Tal Afar and Mosul in June.

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