News Brief #3: Finally justice is returned for Yazidi women in Iraq

by Addison Wright
edited by Jalen Beliveau

For the first time in Iraq, the courts held its Islamic State accountable for its heinous violence against the women of the Yazidi religious minority, according to The New York Times.

There have been thousands of Yazidi women who have been kidnapped, raped, and killed. However among the thousands of trials for members of the Islamic State in Baghdad-Iraq, until March 2nd none had faced trial for these crimes.

(Photo by: The New York Times)

The trial was the first in Iraqi history to specifically address the Islamic State’s crimes against the Yazidis and in which a Yazidi victim personally confronted her attacker. “The most important thing to me is that my dream came true and I was watching the one who raped me being sentenced to death,” said a key witness and victim, Haji Hamid. 

In Iraqi society, it is especially difficult for women to speak out in public about rape, as Haji Hamid did, for fear that they will be accused of having allowed the men to rape them, which will tarnish their family names.

“We hope that if people hear about this case, others will come forward,” said Judge Haider Jalil Khalil of the Kharkh Criminal Court in Baghdad. The defendant, Mohammed Rashid Sahab, 36, who is an Iraqi, was found guilty in the rape and abduction of Yazidi women and was given the death penalty.