Canada to fund investigations into ISIL crimes

ISIL has twice released Yazidi children and elderly, but a number of women are unaccounted for and may have been raped, say human rights groups [Xinhua]

Just six weeks after extending and expanding its military operations against the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, or ISIS), Canada now says it will provide funding to an unnamed independent organization investigating possible war crimes committed by the extremist militant group.

The Canadian government said on Tuesday that it will provide about $1 million for a one-year period to the organization which has since January 2014 been compiling evidence against ISIL and its leaders in Syria.

Following the fall of Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city, to ISIL in June 2014, the organization expanded the range of its investigations to Iraq as well.

Ottawa’s funding comes amid a chorus of warnings from the UN and human rights groups that ISIL is committing atrocities in both Iraq and Syria.

In April, the UN’s human rights council published a report saying that ISIL appeared to be keen on wiping out the ethnic Yazidi minority in Iraq.

It said that possible genocide charges would fall under a greater charge of potential war crimes and crimes against humanity. It called for the International Criminal Court to intervene.

Human Rights Watch has also said that ISIL fighters were systematically raping Yazidi women. Other observers have said that ISIL had kidnapped thousands of Yazidis, including many women. ISIL released a number of Yazidi children and elderly in January, and again in April.

Meanwhile, “Minority communities in Iraq have been targeted by the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) in a systematic strategy to remove them permanently from large areas of Iraq,” a group of human rights organizations said in a February report delivered to the Human Rights Subcommittee of the European Parliament in Brussels.

Titled Between the Millstones: Iraq’s Minorities Since the Fall of Mosul – the report compiled from comprehensive field work and interviews by a number of groups including the Institute of International Law and Human Rights (IILHR), Minority Rights Group International (MRG), No Peace Without Justice (NPWJ) and the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organisation (UNPO).

The BRICS POST with inputs from Agencies