ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - Members of the Yazidi community and their religious leaders gathered in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul on Wednesday - the once de facto capital of the Islamic State's (ISIS) self-proclaimed caliphate in Iraq and Syria - to mark 12 years since the extremist group's genocide against the Yazidis.
Representatives of the community tell Rudaw they are still searching for traces of their relatives, both killed and alive, especially girls and women who were abducted into slavery, more than a decade after the calamity.
"The [Yazidi] girls who were abducted and became victims [to ISIS], who faced atrocities, are today being honored with pride in this very city, Mosul," Erivan Mahdi, a Yazidi member of the Nineveh Provincial Council, told Rudaw's Adla Bakir.
She added that ongoing efforts to return the abducted Yazidi girls and women and recover the remains of Yazidis slain at the hands of ISIS "are not enough."
"Members of the Nineveh Provincial Council must coordinate with the [Kurdistan] Regional Government [KRG], the federal government [in Baghdad], as well as with neighboring countries, because the [abducted] Yazidi girls are not only in Iraq, but also in Syria and Turkey," Mahdi said.
“No mother or father should just sit and wait outside the doors [of officials] hoping that their daughter is alive.”
ISIS seized large parts of northern and western Iraq in June 2014, and by August had launched a brutal campaign against the Yazidi community in their heartland of Shingal (Sinjar), killing an estimated 5,000 to 10,000 Yazidi men and older women, and abducting 6,000 to 7,000 women and girls for sexual slavery and human trafficking.
The United Nations has officially recognized the campaign against the Yazidis as a genocide.
During the ISIS attack on Shingal, around 400,000 Yazidis were forced to flee, with most seeking refuge in the Kurdistan Region. As of late, around 200,000 Yazidis remain displaced, Pascal Reyntjens, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) chief in Iraq told Rudaw on Monday.
For her part, the Yazidi member of Nineveh Provincial Council, Mahdi told Rudaw that the community is also demanding “material and moral compensation for survivors, both female and male.”
She pointed to the One Million Residential Land Plots Initiative - a major social housing program launched by the Iraqi federal government to address the country's severe housing shortage, distributing serviced plots of residential land to Iraqi families who do not currently own a home.
Under the Initiative, Nineveh province is slated to receive approximately 210,000 plots, Mahdi detailed, noting that this effort should “be capitalized on to compensate the [Yazidi] survivors.”
Of note, Hussein Qaidi, head of the Office for Rescuing Kidnapped Yazidis - an affiliate of the Kurdistan Region Presidency - told Rudaw earlier this month that 3,595 Yazidi abductees have been rescued through the office, while thousands of others remain missing.
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