UNITED NATIONS — Six years after Islamic State fighters launched an attack on Iraq’s Yazidi minority, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Nadia Murad and human rights lawyer Amal Clooney accused government leaders and the United Nations on Monday of failing to bring the extremists responsible for the genocide to justice. Murad, whose mother and six brothers were killed by Islamic State fighters, told a U.N. commemoration of the Aug. 3, 2014 massacre in Iraq’s Sinjar region that the Yazidis feel “abandoned” by the international community. The “status quo is destroying our community” and international inaction is enabling the extremist group to “accomplish their goal of eradicating the Yazidis from Iraq,” warned Murad, who was captured by IS and held as a sex slave for months before escaping. Clooney, the wife of actor George Clooney who represents the Yazidis, said that when she addressed the U.N. Security Council last year she proposed ways to achieve justice for those who died, are missing and still captive including authorizing the International Criminal Court to put IS on trial and creating a court by treaty between the U.N. and Iraq.

Source: International New York Times August 03, 2020 21:33 UTC