UN: Islamic State committing genocide against Yazidis

GENEVA – A UN investigative panel on Syria says the Islamic State group is committing genocide and other war crimes against the Yazidi community in Iraq and Syria, and wants countries to do more to stop it.

The Council of Inquiry on Syria issues its first report Thursday specifically looking at IS crimes against Yazidis following the group’s attack on unarmed Yazidi communities in northwestern Iraq in August 2014. Many Yazidis were taken into Syria.

The report says IS still holds over 3,200 Yazidi women and children.

File: A Yazidi Iraqi woman sits with her children at the Bajid Kandala camp near the Tigris River, in Kurdistan’s western Dohuk province, where they took refuge after fleeing advances by Islamic State jihadists in Iraq on August 13, 2014. (AFP/Ahmad Al-Rubaye)

The 41-page report cites slave markets in Syria where Yazidi women and girls are sold exclusively to IS fighters. It says IS has within the last year begun holding online slave auctions with an encrypted application to circulate photos of captured Yazidi women and girls.

— AP