Dharmic Ideas & Policy Foundation     

Please check your details below. If they they are incomplete or need updating, please click on this link

Press Release: For Immediate release                     Friday 14^th June 2019

Plight of the Yezidi people - an unlamented & unresolved genocide. Over 3,000 ISIS captured women still missing. –

Experienced field workers and academics present the way forward at the House of Commons and in Stanmore, Leicester and Birmingham

In the summer of 2014, Islamic State fighters occupied Sinjar in northern Iraq. Particular objects of their hatred were the Yazidis, an ancient people condemned by the Islamic State as pagans. Yazidi men were slaughtered; Yazidi women and children enslaved. Now, even though the Islamic State has been defeated, the majority of Yazidis remain trapped in camps for the displaced, unable to return to their homes, traumatised by their terrible sufferings, and largely forgotten by the world.

This is despite the fact that both the United Nations and governments in Canada, Australia, the EU, the US, France, and Armenia recognised the atrocities committed against the Yazidis as genocide . On 20 April 2016, in the UK, the House of Commons did the same. Resolutions on their own, though, achieve little. The UK refuses to accept Yazidi refugees into the country, while simultaneously making no effort to help resolve the political crisis currently afflicting the Yazidi heartlands around Sinjar. To refuse to help the Yazidis in their hour of need, or to confront the underlying causes of the genocide, constitutes an unacceptable moral failure on our country’s part.

On the 25th of Jun 2019, at 18.30, a meeting to highlight the crisis afflicting the Yazidis will be held in the Grand Committee Room of the Houses of Parliament. It will feature experts from around the world, including:

·        Tom Holland, best-selling author and historian

·        Christine Allison, Ph.D., Professor of Kurdish studies at Exeter University

·        Matthew Barber, former executive director of Yazda Iraq

·        Salwa Khalaf, Yazidi survivor of IS enslavement

·        Dr. Gautam Sen, Ph.D., former lecturer at L.S.E., Director of DIPF

·        Anne Norona, founder of Yezidi Emergency Support

Please see attached pdf for more details on the speakers

~ Information on the event is available at this link: http://www.dipf.org.uk/campaigns/yezidi-plight/

~ To register for free, access this link: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/plight-of-the-yezidi-people-an-unlamented-continuing-genocide-london-hoc-tickets-61797369596

~ Please circulate these links and information to officials and policy makers who may wish to attend.

Together we can work to preserve Iraq’s fragile diversity and ensure the survival of its vulnerable religious minorities.

For further information please contact

Mukesh Naker

Communications Officer for Dharmic Ideas & Policy Foundation

Mobile +44 77 1313 7425

Email - DIPF.correspondence@gmail.com