Yezidi mother with two children rescued from Syria: Kurdistan’s Rescue Office

ERBIL (Kurdistan 24) – The Kurdistan Region’s office dedicated to the rescue of Yezidis (Ezidis) kidnapped by the Islamic State announced on Tuesday that they had brought back another mother and her two children who were abducted in mid-2014.

The extremist group kidnapped them four years ago from the village of Hardan in northern Sinjar (Shingal) town.

“They were rescued from the organization [Islamic State] inside the Syrian territories,” a statement Hussein Qaedi, the head of the office, issued read.

The mother was identified as M. B. H., 25, and the two children were M. M. and M. M.

According to Qaedi, they would be transferred to the Kurdistan Region soon.

Since 2014, the office has saved over 3,345 Ezidis of both genders out of the 6,417 Ezidis the terrorists kidnapped.

The emergence of the Islamic State and its violent assault on Shingal in 2014 led to the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Ezidis. Most of them fled to the Kurdistan Region, while others resettled to neighboring countries in the region or Western states.

Others were not as lucky and remained stranded in the war zone, where they experienced atrocities and mass executions at the hands of the extremist group for years. Militants subjected women and girls to sexual slavery, kidnapped children, forced religious conversions, executed scores of men, and abused, sold, and trafficked females across areas they controlled in Iraq and Syria.

Before the 2014 attack, there were roughly 550,000 Ezidis in the Kurdistan Region and Iraq. As the militant group took over large swaths of territory in Nineveh province, 360,000 Ezidis escaped and found refuge elsewhere, according to the Ezidi Rescue Office.

So far, 69 mass graves which contain the remains of Ezidis have been excavated along with untold numbers of individual graves.

Editing by Karzan Sulaivany