In this 2014 file photo, displaced Iraqis from the Yazidi community gather for humanitarian aid at a camp in Syria.
“While the nightmare of their past has receded, hardships remain for these children,” said Matt Wells, deputy director of Amnesty’s crisis response team. Yazidi children were forcibly converted to Islam and taught Arabic, banned from speaking their native Kurdish. One of them, a ten-year-old girl, had threatened to commit suicide multiple times, her mother told AFP.
Many have also gone into debt from paying thousands of US dollars to smugglers to free Yazidi relatives who were held by IS. Many Yazidi women who were rescued from IS’ last bastion in Syria over the last two years were forced to leave their IS-born children behind when they returned to their families in neighbouring Iraq.