Kurdish leader pledges to avenge Yazidis

DOHUK: The president of Iraq’s autonomous region of Kurdistan, Massud Barzani, promised Monday to avenge the Yazidi minority brutally attacked by Daesh a year ago.
“We will hunt down those who committed this crime until the last one,” Barzani said in Dohuk at a ceremony commemorating the beginning of the militant onslaught against the Yazidis.
A Kurdish-speaking minority mostly based around the Sinjar mountain in northern Iraq, the Yazidis are neither Arabs nor Muslims.
Exactly a year ago, the militants made an unexpected push into areas of northern Iraq that had been under Kurdish control and were home to many of the country’s minorities.
The worst-hit were the Yazidis, who were massacred and abducted in large numbers when Daesh entered the Sinjar area.
Tens of thousands of them scrambled up Mount Sinjar in a panic and remained stranded there for days with no food nor water in searing summer temperatures.
Dramatic footage of their flight through Syria and back into autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan caught the world’s attention.
The rebel onslaught against the Yazidis has been described by the United Nations as “an attempt to commit genocide” and was one of the main justifications for the US-led air campaign against Daesh that began days later.
Backed by the international coalition that subsequently developed, the Kurdish peshmerga as well as Kurdish forces from neighboring Syria have clawed back land, but not all of it.
“They (Daesh) have left thousands of bodies on the battlefield, but this is not enough in comparison with the crimes they committed,” Barzani said. The Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) released figures on the Yazidis saying that the community counts 550,000 members in Iraq.