Iraq: Soldiers and militiamen accused of sexual abuse of Kurdish women

Following reports according to which Iraqi soldiers and militiamen are guilty of targeted sexual violence against Kurdish women, the Society for Threatened Peoples (STP) demands investigations into the serious allegations. “The US and other governments that are part of the anti-IS coalition must investigate reports that members of the army have apparently abused Kurdish women in Iraq,” said the STP’s Middle East Consultant, Kamal Sido, in Göttingen on Friday. “If these allegations are confirmed, cooperations with the Iraqi government must be suspended. The international community is providing military, political, and diplomatic support in order to protect women and children against radical Islamist groups. Thus, it would be an outrageous scandal if members of the army and militiamen had attacked women and used rape as a weapon of war.”

In Kirkuk, Tuz Churmatu, and other places that were taken by the Iraqi army and the allied militias, Kurdish women reported that they had been sexually abused. According to the prevention committee on violence against women, a 16-year-old Kurdish girl had been sexually abused by members of the Iraqi militia Al-Hashd al-Shabi (“People’s Mobilization Forces”) in the Garmiyan region on October 20. In consequence, the girl and her parents are said to have died in a deliberate car accident. The victims are the girl Samia Said Saleh, her mother Sanna Ahmad Omar, and her father Said Saleh Wali. The people in the Garmiyan region in southeastern Iraqi Kurdistan are still traumatized due to the crimes committed by the armed forces of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. In the late 1980s, during the Anfal genocide campaign, tens of thousands of Kurdish villagers had been abducted by the Iraqi army. They were brought to the southern Iraqi desert, from where they never returned.

The Iraqi army and the Iranian-backed Shiite militia Al-Hashd al-Shabi have been carrying out attacks on Iraqi Kurdistan since October 16, 2017. According to friends of the STP in Iraqi Kurdistan, 21 schools and a Sunni mosque were set on fire and destroyed by militiamen in Tuz Churmatu, to the south of the city of Kirkuk, alone. The number of displaced Kurds from the oil-rich Kirkuk region is said to have reached at least 168,000. In the Nineveh Plain, the home of early Christianity on the outskirts of Mosul, the Christian Assyrians/Chaldeans/Aramaeans and Yazidis are on the run from clashes between Kurds and the Iraqi army. Many people who had been driven out of the predominantly Christian-inhabited city of Teleskof by Islamic State and who had later returned were now forced to flee once again – to the neighboring city of Alqosh.

Headerphoto: Nedim Yilmaz via Flickr