Yazidi leaders to allow Isis rape survivors to return with children

Until now, women who refused to be separated from their children were exiled by their community

Martin Chulov Middle East correspondent, and Mohammed Rasool
Sat 27 Apr 2019 07.00 BST

Yazidi survivors groups have embraced a decision by the community’s elders to allow children who are the result of rape by members of Islamic State to return with their Yazidi mothers to their homelands in Iraq.

The landmark ruling by the Yazidi Supreme Spiritual Council has cleared the way for hundreds of women to return from Syria, or Europe, with children that were born to them while captives of the terrorist group.

Until the decision made this week, women who refused to be separated from their children had been exiled by their own community, with many forced into detention camps in north-east Syria. Only those who had agreed to surrender newborns or infants had been allowed to return to their families in northern Iraq.

The decision is likely to directly affect many hundreds of women, who were enslaved by Isis, and routinely raped by the organisation’s members, who declared them to be “godless” and “devil worshippers”. The enslavement took place from August 2014, when the Yazidi heartland near the Sinjar mountains was over-run by the extremists who launched an attempted genocide against the 550,000 strong community, killing at least 5,000 men and capturing many thousands of women and girls.

The shift in policy declared that what had happened to the Yazidi women had been “out of their control”. It said elders had been sent to north-east Syria to look for Yazidi women housed in two large detention camps, with a view to bringing them back to Iraq with their children.

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