Hussein Qaidy: 40% of Yazidi Abductees Still Missing

ARK News.. The head of the Office for the Rescue of Yazidi Abductees from ISIS, Hussein Qaidy, said that 40% of those kidnapped by the terrorist group since August 3, 2014, remain unaccounted for.

Marking the 11th anniversary of the Sinjar massacre, Qaidy stated that according to his office’s statistics, approximately 6,417 Yazidis were abducted by ISIS, while 2,554 of them are still held by the group.

According to figures released in March by the Kurdistan Regional Government’s Office for the Rescue of Yazidi Abductees, the number of Yazidis killed exceeds 5,000, and 2,745 children have been orphaned.
A total of 93 mass graves have been discovered in Sinjar, in addition to dozens of sites containing individual graves.

Of the 6,417 abductees, 3,548 were women and 2,869 were men. A total of 3,585 have been rescued, including 1,211 women, 339 men, 1,074 girls, and 961 boys.

The number of abductees killed by ISIS whose remains have been recovered from mass graves and returned to their families stands at 274—37 women and 237 men. Meanwhile, 2,558 remain missing, including 1,225 women and 1,333 men.

The office noted that 135,860 Yazidi IDPs are currently living in camps across the Kurdistan Region, while another 189,337 reside in various locations throughout the region.

In August 2014, ISIS carried out a genocide against the Yazidis in Sinjar, northern Iraq, killing thousands of men, abducting thousands of women and children who were subjected to enslavement, and committing severe physical and psychological abuses. The group also destroyed religious shrines, burned villages, and forced tens of thousands to flee to Mount Sinjar under dire humanitarian conditions.

Efforts to locate the missing continue, with hundreds of mass graves serving as harrowing evidence of a crime the United Nations has classified as genocide.

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