Loading...
Loading...
Click here if you don’t see subscription options
Displaced Iraqi Christians who fled from Islamic State militants pray at school acting as refugee camp in Irbil. (CNS photo/Ahmed Jadallah, Reuters)

Amnesty International has issued a devastating report detailing summary executions, child abductions, sexual assaults, forced religious conversions and “ethnic cleansing on a historic scale” committed by the Islamic State militant group as it swept across northern Iraq from its base of operations in Syria. Amnesty International found that the Islamic State systematically targeted non-Arab and non-Sunni Muslim communities in overrun communities, killing or abducting hundreds, possibly thousands, and forcing more than 830,000 others to flee the areas it has captured since mid-June. Field investigators conclude that ISIS “is systematically and deliberately carrying out a program of ethnic cleansing in the areas under its control.” Ethnic and religious minorities—Assyrian Christians, Turkmen Shiites, Shabak Shiites, Yazidis, Kakai and Sabean Mandaeans—have lived together in the Nineveh Province, much of it now under ISIS control, for centuries, A.I. researchers point out. “Today, only those who were unable to flee when I.S. fighters seized the area remain trapped there, under threat of death if they do not convert to Islam.”

Comments are automatically closed two weeks after an article's initial publication. See our comments policy for more.

The latest from america

Cardinal Pietro Parolin told some 200,000 people in St. Peter’s Square that Pope Francis had made the message of God’s limitless mercy the heart of his pontificate.
Francis has always been known as “the pope of surprises.”
Gerard O’ConnellApril 26, 2025
“Pope Francis is the pope of the people,” Rosa de los Ríos told America in Spanish before the funeral Mass. “He is very close to the people.... That’s why he was so loved. People felt he was very close to them.”
J.D. Long GarcíaApril 26, 2025
Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelenskyy met inside St. Peter’s Basilica ahead of the funeral for Pope Francis on the morning of April 26.
Associated PressApril 26, 2025