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Investigators Build Case for IS Crimes Against Yazidis

Associated Press

   QASR AL-MIHRAB, IRAQ -- He was burly, with piercing blue eyes, and it
   was clear he was in charge when he entered the Galaxy, a wedding
   hall-turned-slave pen in the Iraqi city of Mosul. Dozens of Yazidi
   women and girls huddled on the floor, newly abducted by Islamic State
   group militants.

   He walked among them, beating them at the slightest sign of resistance.
   At one point, he dragged a girl out of the hall by her hair, clearly
   picking her for himself, a Yazidi woman -- who was 14 when the incident
   occurred in 2014 -- recounted to The Associated Press.

   This was Hajji Abdullah, a religious judge at the time and labeled one
   of the architects of the militant group's enslavement of Iraq's Yazidi
   religious minority, who rose to become deputy to IS leader Abu Bakr
   al-Baghdadi. He's believed to be the late al-Baghdadi's successor,
   identified only by the pseudonym Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi.

   A group of investigators with the Commission for International Justice
   and Accountability is amassing evidence, hoping to prosecute IS figures
   for crimes against humanity, war crimes and genocide -- including Hajji
   Abdullah.

   Hajji Abdullah was previously accused of involvement in the slave
   trade, most notably in a wanted poster circulated by the U.S. setting a
   $5 million bounty on his head. But his prominence in the creation and
   oversight of the slave trade has never been spotlighted.

   "IS fighters didn't take it upon themselves to rape these women and
   girls. There was a carefully executed plan to enslave, sell, and rape
   Yazidi women presided over by the highest levels of the IS leadership,"
   said Bill Wiley, executive director and founder of CIJA. "And in doing
   so, they were going to eradicate the Yazidi group by ensuring there
   were no more Yazidi children born."

   CIJA shared some of its findings with The Associated Press. The group,
   through IS documents and interviews with survivors and insiders,
   identified 49 prominent IS figures who built and managed the slave
   trade, as well as nearly 170 slave owners, including Western, Asian,
   African and Arab fighters. These also include top financiers, military
   commanders, local governors and women traders, many of them from the
   region neighboring the Yazidi community's villages.

   The AP also put together findings from IS's own literature, along with
   interviews with IS members, former slaves and rescuers, to establish
   how slavery was strictly mapped out from the earliest days, devolving
   into a free-for-all with fighters enriching themselves by selling
   Yazidi women as the group's power began to disintegrate.

   CIJA's focus now is to build cases that courts can use to try IS
   members for crimes against humanity or genocide. Countries can
   prosecute militants for individual rapes or torture or for membership
   in a terrorist group. But to prove higher charges, they would need the
   contextual evidence that CIJA provides, showing the crimes were part of
   a greater structure.

   "Practically every Daesh prosecution that has ever happened anywhere in
   the world is a material support case, a membership case," Wiley said,
   using an Arabic name for the group. "Prosecuting high crimes could
   serve as a counter-radicalization tool for IS supporters."

   In the first prosecution on charges of genocide against the Yazidis
   last month, a German court brought an Iraqi national to trial for
   enslaving a Yazidi woman and her 5-year-old, who was chained and left
   to die of thirst. Meanwhile, a U.N. investigative team said it has
   collected evidence from Iraq, including 2 million call records, that
   can strengthen cases of prosecution for crimes against the Yazidis.

   CIJA is sharing its findings from Iraq with the U.N. team and is
   pursuing more evidence from Syria, where IS made its last stand. The
   Syrian Kurdish authority holds perhaps the largest trove of material
   from the group, as well as some 10,000 of its members, including 2,000
   foreign fighters, in detention.

   Investigators' steep challenge: documenting crimes committed over the
   course of four years against millions of people in different countries,
   while many IS members remain at large.

   In the Iraqi city of Mosul, for instance, the crimes took place among a
   population of nearly 2 million people over three years, including
   enslavement, attacks on dissidents, destruction of cultural and
   religious sites and training children in jihad.

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