Skip to main content

Home/ History Readings/ Group items tagged yazidi

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
blaise_glowiak

Isis has abducted up to 400 Yazidi children and could be using them as suicide bombers ... - 0 views

www.independent.co.uk/...-suicide-bombers-a6811876.html

isis iraq kidnapping yazidi

shared by blaise_glowiak on 15 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • blaise_glowiak on 15 Jan 16
     
    Up to 400 abducted Yazidi children are reportedly being trained as potential suicide bombers by Isis. It said Isis had put its most experienced fighters on the front lines and was using child soldiers to plug the resulting gaps in sentry positions and its suicide bomb squads.  Yazidis are a small monotheistic religious group who mostly live in Iraq. They believe there is one God who created the world and placed it under the control of seven angels - the chief of whom is the Peacock Angel, Melek Taus.  But Isis regard them as devil worshippers and have attempted to eradicate the sect.
rachelramirez

Fleeing ISIS tyranny: Agony of the Yazidis - CNN.com - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

tyranny cnn crisis isis yazidi

shared by rachelramirez on 29 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • Fleeing ISIS tyranny: Agony of the Yazidis
  • The faith's roughly 600,000 members are taught that for centuries, they have been persecuted by the majority Muslim population that surrounds them.
  • Yazidi leaders often say their community suffered 73 massacres and genocides.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • "ISIS has taken us back 1,400 years," Othman said.
criscimagnael

Anwar Raslan Syria War Crimes Trial Verdict: Live Updates - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ria-war-crimes-germany-verdict

shared by criscimagnael on 13 Jan 22 - No Cached
  • The former officer, Anwar Raslan, was accused of overseeing a detention center where prosecutors said at least 4,000 people were tortured and nearly 60 were killed.
  • He fled Syria in 2012 after the government committed a massacre in his hometown, killing more than 100 people. He joined Syria’s exiled opposition and traveled with them to peace talks in Geneva in 2014.
  • Through nearly 11 years of civil war, the Syrian government bombed residential neighborhoods, used poison gas and tortured countless detainees in state lockups
  • ...38 more annotations...
  • Mr. Raslan’s guilty verdict, they say, bolsters the ability of European courts to pursue similar cases while sending a message to war criminals around the world that they could one day face consequences.
  • This sends a clear message to the world that certain crimes will not go unpunished.
  • After more than a decade of war, Mr. al-Assad remains in power, and there appears little chance that he or his senior advisers or military commanders will stand trial soon.
  • Other potential avenues for justice have also been blocked. Syria is not party to the International Criminal Court in The Hague, and Russia and China have used their vetoes on the United Nations Security Council to prevent Syria from being referred to the court.
  • Germany is among a few European countries that have sought to try former Syrian officials for war crimes based on universal jurisdiction,
  • German prosecutors argued that his position gave him oversight of torture that included beating, kicking, electric shocks and sexual assault. Witnesses in the trial said they were fed inedible food, denied medical care and kept in overcrowded cells.
  • He entered Germany on a visa in 2014 and lived there legally until the German authorities arrested him in 2019.
  • But his past caught up with him in Germany, where he was tried for crimes against humanity.
  • When the Syrian conflict broke out in 2011 with protests seeking to topple President Bashar al-Assad, Mr. Raslan was the head of interrogation at a security office in the capital, Damascus.
  • Beatings were common, the food was inedible, the cells were so crowded that some prisoners had to stand so others could lie down. German prosecutors said at least 4,000 people were tortured and nearly 60 killed under his authority there.
  • The verdict marks a watershed moment for an international network of lawyers, human rights activists and Syrian war survivors who have struggled for years to bring officials who sanctioned or participated in the violence to justice.
  • He was arrested in 2019, and his trial began the next year. On Thursday, Mr. Raslan was found guilty of crimes against humanity and was sentenced to life in prison.
  • When Mahran Aoiun heard that a former Syrian intelligence officer had been sentenced on Thursday to life in prison for overseeing torture at a detention center, it brought back the joy he felt years ago when he was released from a brutal Syrian jail.
  • The verdict handed down by a court in Koblenz, Germany, against the former officer, Ansar Raslan, stirred complicated feelings among Syrians who were abused in Syrian prisons — some at the hands of Mr. Raslan himself.
  • Others hoped that Mr. Raslan’s conviction would draw attention to the many more crimes committed during the Syrian war that have not been prosecuted, and to the officials who committed them who are still free.
  • “Those who are torturing prisoners will think twice after the trial,” he said. “This is an achievement.”
  • New York Times photographers have covered Syria’s civil war and the humanitarian crisis it has unleashed since the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad began nearly 11 years ago.
  • A Syrian doctor accused of torturing a detainee in a secret military prison will soon go on trial in Germany on charges of crimes against humanity and causing grievous bodily harm. The doctor, Alaa Mousa, was living in Germany as a refugee when he was arrested in 2020.
  • German prosecutors built their case with the help of hundreds of Syrian witnesses in Germany and beyond. They indicted Mr. Raslan using “universal jurisdiction,” a legal principle stipulating that in the case of crimes against humanity and genocide, normal territorial restraints on prosecutions do not apply.
  • The principle is not new. Israel used it during the 1960s trial of the former Nazi official Adolf Eichmann, as did Spain in 1998 when demanding that Britain arrest Gen. Augusto Pinochet, the former Chilean dictator. Previous universal jurisdiction cases in Germany have dealt with crimes committed in Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, and, more recently, with the genocide of Yazidis in Iraq by former members of the Islamic State.
  • Germany has the legal basis to prosecute such crimes under the German Code of Crimes Against International Law, which came into effect in 2002, and it has been using it.
  • “For Germany, it’s also historically the continuation of what we learned from the Nazi period and what we learned about the importance of the Nuremberg trials and the Auschwitz trials for the way we dealt with our past and ultimately for who we are today,”
  • The Nuremberg trials went after the leading members of the Nazi regime, but also a range of individuals who played a role in Nazi repression, including doctors, business leaders, bureaucrats and propagandists, said Wolfgang Kaleck, a founder of the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, which is representing victims in Mr. Raslan’s trial.
  • Raslan is the first ranking Syrian official to be convicted of war crimes, but he may not be the last.
  • But several other cases have already been tried or are pending.
  • Owing partly to its own history in World War II, Germany has become something of a go-to venue for prosecuting crimes against humanity, even if committed outside its own borders. It is also home to hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees, putting it at the center of efforts to hold the government of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria accountable for war crimes.
  • Human rights lawyers concede that so far, the trials have targeted low- and middle-ranking Syrian officials or soldiers.
  • “If you don’t start now, then in 10 years, you cannot get Assad or his chief of intelligence because you have no evidence,” Mr. Kaleck said. “These cases are a way of building a stock of documents, witness statements, of understanding interconnections and gathering knowledge on which you can build future cases.”
  • Since the Syrian uprising in 2011, Syrian victims, human rights activists and others have filed more than 20 legal complaints against Syrian regime officials for war crimes and other violations of international law, according to Mr. Kaleck’s center.
  • This body of evidence, which has been growing for over a decade, could be used in different cases.“More has to come, that is clear,” Mr. Kaleck said. “But this is an important step.”
  • But the decade-long conflict has left the country shattered, killing hundreds of thousands of people, forcing half of the population from their homes and reducing major cities to rubble. Most of those who remain have been left to live in poverty.
  • The rebellion that began in 2011 as an uprising against Syria’s autocratic president, Bashar al-Assad, escalated into a civil war, but the splinted rebel movement failed to topple the government.
  • But the war was gruesome. The government employed poison gas, barrel bombs and suffocating sieges on rebellious communities, and waged a ruthless assault on civilian opponents, throwing hundreds of thousands into filthy prisons where many were tortured and killed.
  • Some Arab countries have begun restoring ties with the government in an effort to move past the war, although strict sanctions by the United States and other Western countries have blocked most investment.
  • The United States initially provided covert military support to the rebels, but as the war splintered into multiple overlapping conflicts, America shifted its focus to fight the jihadists of the Islamic State, who at their peak controlled nearly a third of eastern Syria.
  • For Syrian civilians, there is less daily violence now than during the war’s earlier years, but the economy has been destroyed.
  • More than half of Syria’s prewar population fled their homes during the fighting, and most have not returned, including the 5.6 million refugees who largely live in destitution in neighboring Arab countries.
  • “Justice has not been fully accomplished,” he said. “This is a small slice of what we are talking about.”
Javier E

The Empire Is Striking Back « The Dish - 0 views

dish.andrewsullivan.com/...the-empire-is-striking-back

iraq us foreign policy hilary obama

shared by Javier E on 11 Aug 14 - No Cached
  • The Obama administration is now facing a real test of its resolve in Iraq. The depressing but utterly predictable resurgence of Sunni Jihadism in a country broken in 2003 and never put back together again by the “surge” has been so successful and the Iraqi government so weak that even Kurdistan is now at risk. The policy now is to do enough – but no more – to keep the Kurds in the game, keep the Yazidis on planet earth and push the Iraqis in Baghdad to get real.
  • the greatest throwback to 2003 in this respect is Hillary Clinton. So far as one can tell from her interview with Jeffrey Goldberg, there is no daylight between her and John McCain or even Benjamin Netanyahu – but a hell of a lot of space between her and Barack Obama
  • Obama’s signature achievement so far has been his steadiness in resisting that vortex, in defusing Jihadism rather than giving it yet more reason to be inflamed, in being that rare president capable of internalizing what most Americans want – rather than what Sunday talk show blowhards demand.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Clinton’s position is Netanyahu’s. And that’s important to understand. If you want a United States with no daylight between it and any Israeli government, whatever that government may do, vote for Clinton. If you want someone who believes the Libya intervention was the right thing to do, vote for Clinton. If you think America’s problem is not torture or drones or destabilizing occupations or debt but that we don’t tell the world how great we are enough, then vote for Clinton. If you really long for 2003 again, vote for Clinton.
  • isn’t it amazing that after the catastrophes of the Bush-Cheney era, both parties could effectively be running neocons for the presidency in 2016! Welcome to Washington – where the past is always present, amnesia is a lubricant, and the leading Democrat is running as a neocon.
jlessner

U.N. Finds 'Alarmingly High' Levels of Violence Against Women - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...of-violence-against-women.html

violence US culture history

shared by jlessner on 09 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • The gang rape of a young woman on a bus in New Delhi sets off an unusual burst of national outrage in India. In South Sudan, women are assaulted by both sides in the civil war. In Iraq, jihadists enslave women for sex. And American colleges face mounting scrutiny about campus rape.
  • Despite the many gains women have made in education, health and even political power in the course of a generation, violence against women and girls worldwide “persists at alarmingly high levels,” according to a United Nations analysis that the Secretary General Ban Ki-moon is scheduled to present to the General Assembly on Monday.
  • About 35 percent of women worldwide — more than one in three — said they had experienced physical violence in their lifetime,
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • One in 10 girls under the age of 18 was forced to have sex, it says.
  • 38 percent of women who are murdered are killed by their partners.Continue reading the main story
  • Where there are laws on the books, like ones that criminalize domestic violence, for instance, they are not reliably enforced.
alexdeltufo

The Fight for Mosul - The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...the-front-lines

shared by alexdeltufo on 15 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • held a press conference on a hill overlooking Sinjar, a town in the northwestern corner of Iraq
  • hey were routed from it by the Islamic State, or ISIS, in August of 2014.
  • After a retinue of bodyguards spirited the President away in a sport-utility vehicle, the foreign correspondents and local journalists headed down the hill to view the damage
  • ...19 more annotations...
  • ISIS had killed or displaced nearly all the inhabitants, most of whom belonged to Iraq’s Yazidi religious minority.
  • A lone man with a rifle seemed to know where he was going. We hurried to catch up with him.
  • hat June, ISIS captured Mosul—the second-largest city in the country, eighty miles to the east—yet most residents still felt safe. But when ISIS moved into Sinjar the peshmerga withdrew. Hundreds of civilians were killed.
  • living in tents with little food or water, waiting for the day when they could return to their
  • A crowd had assembled around the entrance to the house.
  • a group of Iraqi police officers appeared. The mayor hailed them.
  • That night, we camped in the mountains. Early the next morning, as we navigated the ninety-three hairpin turns that led down to the town, it was easy to appreciate Sinjar’s strategic importance:
  • There were villages out there, too: vague compounds, water tanks, radio towers.
  • An explosion erupted nearby, and then gunfire. Soldiers grabbed weapons and ran into a dense collection of buildings behind us.
  • “He still has a gun!” someone yelled. “He’s still alive!” “Get out of there! He might blow himself up!”
  • “What will you do now?” I asked. Azad looked around. It was getting dark. “Go back up the mountain,” he said. He turned and walked away.
  • “Still alive.”
  • No one seemed to hear.
  • But Iraq’s northern front has remained relatively static. Tens of thousands of Kurdish troops man fixed positions along six hundred miles of trenches connecting Syria to Iran
  • When I visited the peshmerga unit on the ridge, its operations officer told me that they could easily take the town below, Bashiqa. But Mosul lies only ten miles farther, and there are numerous villages in between.
  • U.S. disbanded the Iraqi Army and eradicated the Baath Party, it became famous for producing skilled insurgents. Iraq’s Prime Minister at the time of the American withdrawal, in 2011
  • Atheel al-Nujaifi, a former governor of Nineveh Province, which includes Mosul and Sinjar, told me last spring.
  • A few weeks later, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of ISIS, emerged for the first time in years and delivered a speech—videotaped and published online—from the Great Mosque of al-Nuri. ISIS had proclaimed the establishment of a caliphate
  • n, Barzani’s chief of staff. “There is one thing that everybody knows,” he told me.
Javier E

2 American Wives of ISIS Militants Want to Return Home - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...amic-state-american-women.html

terrorism mentality recruiting isis

shared by Javier E on 20 Feb 19 - No Cached
  • She took the name Umm Jihad, or “Mother of Jihad.” Home alone as her husband went out to fight, she posted toxic tweets under her pseudonym. “Hats off to the mujs in Paris,” she said in one of them, using an abbreviation for “mujahedeen” on the day in 2015 when jihadists stormed the offices of Charlie Hebdo and killed 12 people at the satirical magazine.She also urged others to join the terror organization. “There are soooo many Aussies and Brits here but where are the Americans, wake up u cowards,” she posted.And she used her account to help incite attacks in the West, including in the United States. “Americans wake up!” she wrote on March 15, 2015. “You have much to do while you live under our greatest enemy, enough of your sleeping! Go on drive-bys and spill all of their blood, or rent a big truck and drive all over them.”
  • By the time Ms. Polman arrived in the caliphate, its crimes were well documented, including beheading journalists, enslaving and systematically raping women from the Yazidi minority and burning prisoners alive. Both she and Ms. Muthana were evasive when asked about that brutality.
  • In her telling, Ms. Muthana began to pull away from the terrorist group in her second year in the caliphate. She was married to a second fighter and was pregnant. Anemic from an iron deficiency, she spent much of her time in bed.“I started having doubts,” she said in an account that The Times could not verify. “I was pregnant. Very emotional, because I missed my family,” she said. “I thought — what am I doing?
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • “I’m not interested in bloodshed, and I didn’t know what to believe,” Ms. Polman said. “These are videos on YouTube. What’s real? What’s not real?
  • They began talking about making a run for it, and they said they shared their growing horror over the choices they had made.“It’s hard to change your mind-set when you have lost everything and sacrificed everything. Even if you feel a tug that tells you something’s not right here, this isn’t O.K., and that there’s too many holes here, something’s wrong, I think it’s very, very difficult when you feel like you have burned bridges, to know how to shift,” Ms. Polman said
  • “I realized how I didn’t appreciate or maybe even really understand how important the freedoms that we have in America are. I do now,” she wrote. “To say that I regret my past words, any pain that I caused my family and any concerns I would cause my country would be hard for me to really express properly.”
anonymous

Resignation syndrome: Sweden's mystery illness - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...magazine-41748485

asylum trauma immigration health sweden

shared by anonymous on 05 Nov 17 - No Cached
  • Resignation syndrome: Sweden's mystery illness
  • Resignation Syndrome, it affects only the children of asylum-seekers, who withdraw completely, ceasing to walk or talk, or open their eyes. Eventually they recover.
  • When her father picks her up from her wheelchair, nine-year-old Sophie is lifeless. In contrast, her hair is thick and shiny - like a healthy child's. But Sophie's eyes are closed. And under her tracksuit bottoms she wears a nappy. A transparent feeding tube runs into Sophie's nose - this is how she has been nourished for the past 20 months.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • The health professionals who treat these children agree that trauma is what has caused them to withdraw from the world. The children who are most vulnerable are those who have witnessed extreme violence - often against their parents - or whose families have fled a deeply insecure environment.
  • Resignation Syndrome was first reported in Sweden in the late 1990s. More than 400 cases were reported in the two years from 2003-2005.
  • It remains the case that children from particular geographical and ethnic groups are the most vulnerable: those from the former USSR, the Balkans, Roma children, and most recently the Yazidi.
  • Numerous conditions resembling Resignation Syndrome have been reported before - among Nazi concentration camp inmates, for example. In the UK, a similar condition - Pervasive Refusal Syndrome - was identified in children in the early 1990s, but there have been only a tiny handful of cases, and none of them among asylum seekers.
johnsonel7

Opinion | Trump Takes Incoherence and Inhumanity and Calls It Foreign Policy - The New ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...trump-turkey-military.html

trump opinion obama foreign policy

shared by johnsonel7 on 19 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • .“While America has never been able to right every wrong, America has made the world a more secure and prosperous place,” Obama declared at the time. “And our leadership is necessary to underwrite the global security and prosperity that our children and our grandchildren will depend upon.”Contrast Obama’s move, successfully working with allies to avert a genocide, with President Trump’s betrayal this month of those same Kurdish partners in a way that handed a victory to the Islamic State, Turkey, Syria, Iran — and, of course, Russia, because almost everything Trump does seems to end up benefiting Moscow.
  • Given the Kurdish heroism in arresting genocide against the Yazidi in 2014, it is savagely ironic that Trump’s betrayal has now put the Kurds themselves at risk of war crimes and ethnic cleansing by Turkey.
  • So we’re sending more troops to Saudi Arabia to help a misogynist dictatorship that kills a journalist for an American newspaper, even as we betray the Kurds who have been trying to build a democratic enclave that empowers women; we’re sending troops to Saudi Arabia to confront Iran, even as we give Iran a helping hand in Syria.This is where incoherence and inhumanity converge
anonymous

Uighurs: China rebuffs Pope's criticism as 'groundless' | BBC - 0 views

www.bbc.co.uk/...world-asia-china-55067700

china uighurs humanrights

shared by anonymous on 07 Dec 20 - No Cached
  • Beijing has dismissed Pope Francis's criticisms of its treatment of China's Muslim Uighur minority in Xinjiang.
  • growing group of international voices, describing the Uighurs as "persecuted" in a new book.
  • the Chinese government has detained up to a million Uighurs in what the state defines as "re-education camps".
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • "I think often of persecuted peoples: the Rohingya, the poor Uighurs, the Yazidi".
  • citing terrorism and security risks.
  • China initially denied the existence of the camps, before saying the internment sites provide job training and education.
  • central government policies have gradually curtailed the Uighurs' religious, commercial and cultural activities, as large numbers of majority Han Chinese have been encouraged to move to the region.
1 - 10 of 10
Showing 20▼ items per page