Thread by @AzzatAlsaalem

This is how lSlS sold Yezidi women in sIavery markets in Iraq and Syria.

7000 Yezidi women and children were kidnapped and enslaved.
10,000 were kiIled for refusing to convert to lsIam.

Still 2713 Yezidis are missing in lSlS captivity.
#TheKeralaStory
#IntlProtection4Yazidis

The Islamic State did not just come to kill us, but to take us as merchandise to be sold in markets.

#YazidiGenocide

In the early hours of the morning of Sunday 3 August 2014, Kocho’s residents woke to the sound of gun and mortar fire as surrounding Yazidi villages came under ISIS attack.

A mass grave to bury the remains of Yazidi victims.

Over the next 12 days, Sheikh Ahmed Jasso (village headman) & other men in Kocho held multiple meetings with ISIS leader Abu Hamza, to reach a resolution with ISIS, by give up Yazidis' possessions as the price 4 safe passage out of ISIS-controlled territory & not convert to Islam

On 15 Aug, the attempts to resolve the situation failed. Abu Hamza ordered all of Kocho’s remaining Yazidis,1,200 ppl, to gather in the village school. On arrival, the women & younger children were forced upstairs, while the men & adolescent boys were kept on the ground floor.

On the ground floor of Kocho school, the ISIS commander berated the Yazidi men & older boys for their reluctance to convert to Islam.
ISIS fighters ordered them to surrender their gold, money, mobile telephones, & other valuables.

Some of the male survivors have reported that the fighters stated the Yazidis’ possessions were the price they were paying to leave Kocho safely. The fighters then began to force the men and older boys out of the school at gunpoint.

Yazidi men and boys were taken out of the Kocho village school in groups. Three of the few male survivors later described to @amnesty being shoved into vehicles that were driven short distances.

ISIS terrorists pulled the Yazidi men and older boys from the vehicles and forced them to kneel or crouch on the ground before shooting them.
At least one of the massacre sites was close enough to the school for the women and children to hear the sound of gunfire.

ISIS fighters reportedly used bulldozers to pile earth over the bodies. A few weeks later, ISIS held another group of Yazidis in a then-empty Kocho village. Female survivors of this group described a strong stench of corpses pervading the village.

Since ISIS was ousted from Kocho in May 2017, at least 17 mass graves holding the remains of men and adolescent boys have been discovered inside the village’s perimeter.

#YazidiGenocide

In March 2019, the Government of Iraq, together with @icmp and @UNITAD_Iraq began the process of excavating Kocho’s mass graves, and of forensically analysing and identifying the remains of those buried within.

#YazidiGenocide

After most of the men and older boys had been taken out of the school, ISIS fighters ordered the women and younger children downstairs. Confronted with their male relatives’ possessions, the women and girls were forced to add their jewellery and other valuables to the piles.

ISIS threatened that anyone caught hiding anything of value would be killed. ISIS fighters began to select unmarried girls, between the ages of 13 & 16, & took them away. Their mothers, screaming & desperately trying to hold on to their daughters, were beaten back by the fighters

Within hours of entering the school, ISIS fighters ordered the remaining women & children, who numbered in their hundreds, into vehicles & drove them out of Kocho to a village closer to the base of Mt Shingal. There, they were housed in Solagh Technical Institute.
#YazidiPlight

ISIS separated the group into two. Married women, surviving boys, & girls younger than 9 yrs of age were placed on the 2nd floor. Unmarried women & older girls remained on the ground floor. Fighters continued to arrive at the holding site, selecting & taking away women and girls.

They took boys who were over the age of 7. Later testimonies would suggest that boys were taken to IS training camps, where they were given Muslim names, indoctrinated, & trained 2 fight. Any1 who attempted 2 prevent fighters from taking away Yazidi boys&girls was brutally beaten

In the early hours of 16 Aug, ISIS ordered the terrified, exhausted women & girls into the yard of the school. There they separated the women who were deemed to be past childbearing age from the others, before leading them away.

Survivors of the group left in the yard said they heard a volley of gunfire, before collapsing into panic and screaming. When the area was retaken from ISIS in 2017, a mass grave containing the remains of women was uncovered in the yard of the school.

After sunrise, ISIS loaded the surviving residents of Kocho – all women and children – into trucks and buses and transported them to holding sites deeper inside ISIS-controlled territory.

#YazidiGenocide

These holding sites included multiple schools in Tel Afar; Badoush prison outside of Mosul city; a wedding hall in Mosul; and houses in the Al-Arabi neighbourhood of Mosul city.

In August 2014, ISIS killed and captured thousands of Yazidi men, women and children. Kocho’s fate, though delayed, was the same of that of Yazidis from villages all across Sinjar.

Regardless of where the Yazidi families were captured, ISIS fighters swiftly ordered the separation of males and females, with the exception of boys who had not reached puberty who were allowed to remain with their mothers.

ISIS terrorists carried out executions of male Yazidis in the streets, at makeshift checkpoints, and on roadsides, as well as on the lower sections of the roads ascending Mount Shingal.

Other captives, including family members, were often forced to witness the killings. Most killings were of groups of between two and twenty men and boys.