Iraq official: Militants hold 100s of Yazidi women

August 09, 2014 03:53

Hundreds of women from the Yazidi religious minority have been taken captive by Sunni militants with "vicious plans," an Iraqi official has said, further underscoring the dire plight of Iraq's minorities at the hands of the Islamic State group.

Kamil Amin, the spokesman for Iraq's Human Rights Ministry, said yesterday hundreds of Yazidi women below the age of 35 are being held in schools in Iraq's second largest city, Mosul. He said the ministry learned of the captives from their families.

"We think that the terrorists by now consider them slaves and they have vicious plans for them," Amin told The Associated Press. "We think that these women are going to be used in demeaning ways by those terrorists to satisfy their animalistic urges in a way that contradicts all the human and Islamic values."

The US has confirmed that the Islamic State group has kidnapped and imprisoned Yazidi women so that they can be sold or married off to extremist fighters, said a US official who spoke on condition of anonymity because the information came from classified intelligence reports.

There was no solid estimate of the number of women victimized, the official said.

Tens of thousands of Yazidis fled when the Islamic State group earlier this month captured the northern Iraqi town of Sinjar, near the Syrian border. The Yazidis practice an ancient religion that the Sunni Muslim radicals consider heretical.

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