Amnesty International has issued a devastating report detailing summary executions, child abductions, sexual assaults, forced religious conversions and “ethnic cleansing on a historic scale” committed by the Islamic State militant group as it swept across northern Iraq from its base of operations in Syria. Amnesty International found that the Islamic State systematically targeted non-Arab and non-Sunni Muslim communities in overrun communities, killing or abducting hundreds, possibly thousands, and forcing more than 830,000 others to flee the areas it has captured since mid-June. Field investigators conclude that ISIS “is systematically and deliberately carrying out a program of ethnic cleansing in the areas under its control.” Ethnic and religious minorities—Assyrian Christians, Turkmen Shiites, Shabak Shiites, Yazidis, Kakai and Sabean Mandaeans—have lived together in the Nineveh Province, much of it now under ISIS control, for centuries, A.I. researchers point out. “Today, only those who were unable to flee when I.S. fighters seized the area remain trapped there, under threat of death if they do not convert to Islam.”
ISIS Terror Tracked
Show Comments (
)
Comments are automatically closed two weeks after an article's initial publication. See our comments policy for more.
The latest from america
Pope Leo said that if the teen “had come all the way to Rome, then (the pope) could come all the way to the hospital to see him.”
A Reflection for Tuesday of the Eighteenth Week in Ordinary Time, by Molly Cahill
As emergency workers searched for survivors and tried to recuperate the bodies of the dead, Pope Leo XIV offered his prayers for people impacted by the latest shipwreck of a migrant boat off the coast of Yemen.
The Archdiocese of Miami celebrated the first Mass for detainees at “Alligator Alcatraz,” the Trump administration’s controversial immigrant detention center in the Florida Everglades.