Children born of Izadi mothers raped by Daesh members not Izadis: Izadi body

The spiritual council for Iraq’s Izadi community says it will not embrace children born to Izadi women raped by members of the Takfiri Daesh terrorist group.

The Supreme Spiritual Council of Iraq’s Izadis made the remark in a statement late on Saturday, just days after it announced that it would accept “all survivors” of the terror group’s attempted annihilation of the ethno-religious minority community.

The Izadi community, which once had 500,000 members living in the mountainous Sinjar region of northwest Iraq, was brutally ravaged by Daesh’s mid-2014 sweep into the area. Terrorists killed Izadi men, forcefully recruited boys, and kidnapped and imprisoned women and girls as sex slaves.

The children born of those rapes have been the subject of heated debate in the community, which only recognizes children as Izadis if both their parents have been members of the minority.

On Wednesday, Hazem Tahsin, the head of the Supreme Spiritual Council, issued a decree saying that the council was “accepting all survivors (of Daesh crimes) and considering what they went through to have been against their will.”

The decision was hailed as “historic” by Izadi activists, who interpreted it to mean that children born of rape would now be allowed to live among their Izadi relatives.

However, the council said in its clarification statement that the decision “does not include children born of rape, but refers to children born of two Izadi parents.”

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The minority had long regarded any woman marrying outside the community to no longer be Izadi, initially including those assaulted by Daesh in 2014. But in 2015, Izadi spiritual leader Baba Sheikh issued a decree embracing those women back home, without resolving the fate of their children.

Many Izadi women, who had been abducted by Daesh terrorists, managed to escape from the grips of their captors in recent years, and dozens more fled to safety in the last few months as the Daesh’s so-called “caliphate” crumbled in Syria.

Those women, who had children with Daesh terrorists, faced a tough choice: either remain ex-communicated from their Izadi families and relatives, or leave their children behind. Dozens of the mothers who came back to the Izadi heartland of Sinjar in recent months chose the latter.

Sinjar was recaptured in November 2015, during an operation by Kurdish Peshmerga forces and Izadi fighters.

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