Islamic State militants gangrape Yazidi women in public

Iraq: Distressing accounts released this week reveal the extent of Islamic State brutality against Yazidi women and children who were abducted from the town of Sinjar, in northern Iraq, and held hostage for over eight months.

According to the first-hand accounts, Yazidi women released by IS were gang-raped in public by fighters and tortured by their captors.

The women, who were released by fighters earlier this week, talked about the physical and sexual abuse they suffered while held in captivity.

Ziyad Shammo Khalaf, who works with the Yazda organisation to support Yazidi victims, said children were separated from their mothers and "distributed among houses" in Mosul and Tal Afar.

"If you come and sit with the girls you will find different stories from girl to girl. A lot of them have been sold to Isis fighters, they have been raped in public, and by more than two or three people at a time," he told the International Business Times. "They were tortured, beaten and subject to any type of violence."

The Islamic State group freed more than 200 members of Iraq's Yazidi minority it held captive for months, a commander in the Kurdish peshmerga security forces said Wednesday.

Yazidi women released by Islamic State group militants, hug as they arrive in Kirkuk, 180 miles (290 kilometers) north of Baghdad, Iraq, Wednesday, April 8, 2015. The Islamic State group released more than 200 Yazidis on Wednesday after holding them for eight months, an Iraqi Kurdish security official said, the latest mass release of captives by the extremists. 

"We have received 227 Yazidis, among them women and children" in the northern province of Kirkuk Wednesday, Major General Westa Rasul told AFP.

"We negotiated for days with tribal sheikhs in Hawijah and were able to free the kidnapped Yazidis," Rasul said, referring to an IS-controlled town in Kirkuk.

The Yazidis were actually freed Monday in Nineveh province, northwest of Kirkuk, but did not make their way to a Kurdish-controlled territory until two days later, he said.

The mass release of the Yazidis, kidnapped in Nineveh last year, is the second of its kind, after some 200 mainly elderly people were set free in January.

A sweeping IS offensive overran large areas north and west of Baghdad last June. A second drive in August targeted areas in the north that were home to many of Iraq's minorities.

The Yazidis, who are neither Muslims nor Arabs, practice a unique faith and are considered infidels by the jihadists. They were hit harder than others.

They looked in danger of being wiped out of their ancestral land until a US-led air campaign turned the tide on IS advances in northern Iraq.

The UN has said the IS campaign of killings, abductions and rape against Yazidis may amount to genocide.

Yazidi women and children, released by Islamic State group militants, arrive in Kirkuk, 180 miles (290 kilometers) north of Baghdad, Iraq, Wednesday, April 8, 2015. The Islamic State group released more than 200 Yazidis Wednesday after holding them for eight months, an Iraqi Kurdish security official said, the latest mass release of captives by the extremists.

IS holding 50 Syrian hostages

IS are holding hostage at least 50 civilians, almost half of them women, seized in a raid on a village in central Syria, a monitor said.

They were kidnapped from the village of Mabujeh in Hama province on March 31, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

News of the kidnappings had been kept quiet because of ongoing negotiations for their release, but the talks have since faltered, said Observatory head Rami Abdel Rahman.

Ten of those taken, including six women, are Ismailis, a minority sect that is an offshoot of Shiite Islam. The remaining 40 are Sunni Muslims, including at least 15 women.

“There are fears that the women are being taken as slaves,” Abdel Rahman told AFP.

He said the Ismailis were kidnapped because ISIS considers them “infidels,” and that the Sunnis -- although from the same sect as IS fighters -- were taken because ISIS viewed them as “loyal to the Ismailis”.

Mabujeh, east of the provincial capital Hama, has a population of Sunnis, Ismailis and Alawites, another offshoot of Shiite Islam that is the sect of President Bashar al-Assad and his clan.

On March 31, IS executed at least 37 civilians in Mabujeh, including two children, by “burning, beheading, and firing on them,” the Observatory said.

IS has regularly targeted minority sects in Syria, especially Shiites it accuses of apostasy, as well as Sunnis who it alleges have violated its interpretation of Islam.

It has also carried out mass kidnappings of Kurds and Assyrian Christians in Syria, and members of the Yazidi faith in neighboring Iraq.