BERLIN: Germany’s Bundestag recognized the 2014 massacre of Yazidi minority group in Iraq and Syria by the armed group ISIL (ISIS) as a “genocide”. The German parliament also called for measures to assist the besieged minority.
In a move hailed by Yazidi community representatives, deputies in the Bundestag unanimously passed the motion by the three parliamentary groups in Germany’s ruling center-left-led coalition and Conservative MPs.
The chamber recognized the crimes against the Yazidi community as genocide following the legal evaluations of investigators from the United Nations.
The Bundestag Resolution
The text of the resolution condemns the “indescribable atrocities” and “tyrannical injustice” carried out by IS fighters “with the intention of completely wiping out the Yazidi community”.
The motion urges the German judicial system to pursue further criminal cases against suspects in Germany. The government is to increase financial support to collect evidence of crimes in Iraq. It is also hoping to boost funding to help rebuild shattered Yazidi communities.
Green party lawmaker Max Lucks said Germany was home to what is believed to be the world’s largest Yazidi diaspora of about 150,000 people, meaning the country had a particular responsibility to the community. “
Their pain will never go away,” he told the Bundestag. “We owe this to the Yazidis because we did not take action [in 2014] when we were needed. Our silence cost lives.”
Yazidi Massacre of 2014
ISIL killed more than 1,200 Yazidis, enslaved 7,000 Yazidi women and girls, and displaced most of the 550,000-strong community from their homes in northern Iraq, after seizing large parts of Iraq and Syria in 2014.
ISIS launched the Yazidi Genocide in 2014, targeting Iraq’s Yazidi minority for mass execution, mass rape, systematic sexual slavery and forced labor, and forced religious conversion
