IS's crimes of
murder,
ethnic cleansing,
enslavement and
rape against
Shia,
Christian,
Yazidis and various religious minorities within its territories were recognized as a
genocide by the
European Parliament and
U.S. House of Representatives in 2014. In 2017, CNN journalists Jomana Karadsheh and Chris Jackson reported exclusively on the efforts by Commission for International Justice and Accountability (CIJA) to bring IS to justice of war crimes committed against Yazidis. There are also many Sunni Muslim victims of IS. One captured IS fighter boasted about raping over 200 women from Iraq's minority groups and killing over 500 people and claimed he was encouraged to do so by the leadership. On occasions, IS executed women who refused to have sex with its fighters. In a briefing to the UN Security Council held on 10 May 2021, a UN investigative team stated that IS launched a
genocide against Yazidis "as a religious group" during the
Sinjar massacre, with the objective of eliminating them "physically and biologically".
Religious and minority group massacres, forced conversion, and expulsion refugees on
Mount Sinjar in August 2014 IS compels people in the areas that it controls to live according to its interpretation of sharia law. There have been many reports of the group's use of death threats, torture and mutilation to compel conversion to Islam, IS fighters have targeted Syria's minority Alawite sect. IS and affiliated jihadist groups reportedly took the lead in
an offensive on Alawite villages in
Latakia Governorate of Syria in August 2013.
Amnesty International has held IS responsible for the
ethnic cleansing of ethnic and religious minority groups in northern Iraq on a "historic scale", putting entire communities "at risk of being wiped off the map of Iraq". In a special report released on 2 September 2014, the organization described how IS had "systematically targeted non-Arab and non-Sunni Muslim communities, killing or abducting hundreds, possibly thousands, of individuals and forcing more than 830,000 others to flee the areas it has captured since 10 June 2014". Among these people were Assyrian Christians, Turkmen Shia, Shabak Shia,
Kaka'i, Yazidis and Mandaeans, who have lived together for centuries in
Nineveh province, large parts of which have come under IS's control. Among the known killings of religious and minority group civilians carried out by IS are those in the villages and towns of
Quiniyeh (70–90 Yazidis killed),
Hardan (60 Yazidis killed),
Sinjar (500–2,000 Yazidis killed), Ramadi Jabal (60–70 Yazidis killed), Dhola (50 Yazidis killed), Khana Sor (100 Yazidis killed), Hardan area (250–300 Yazidis killed), al-Shimal (dozens of Yazidis killed), Khocho (400 Yazidis killed and 1,000 abducted), Jadala (14 Yazidis killed) and Beshir (700 Shia Turkmen killed), and others committed near Mosul (670 Shia inmates of the Badush prison killed), and in
Tal Afar prison, Iraq (200 Yazidis killed for refusing conversion). In the Syrian towns of Ghraneij, Abu Haman and Kashkiyeh 700 members of the Sunni
Al-Shaitat tribe were killed for attempting an uprising against IS control. The UN reported that in June 2014 IS had killed a number of Sunni Islamic clerics who refused to pledge allegiance to it. Christians living in areas under IS control face four options: converting to Islam, paying a religious levy called the
jizya, leaving the caliphate, or death. "We offer them three choices: Islam; the
dhimma contract – involving payment of jizya; if they refuse this they will have nothing but the sword", IS said.
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of IS till his 2019 demise, further noted that Christians who do not agree with those terms must "leave the borders of the Islamic Caliphate" within a specified deadline. However, on 29 March 2016, IS issued a decree preventing Christians and Armenians from leaving Raqqa. On 23 February 2015, in response to a major Kurdish offensive in the
Al-Hasakah Governorate, IS abducted 150
Assyrian Christians from villages near Tal Tamr (
Tell Tamer) in northeastern Syria, after launching a large offensive in the region. Kurdish officials have claimed that
IS's campaign against Kurdish and
Yezidi enclaves, such as Sinjar, are part of an organised Arabization plan. According to Iraqi security officials, Islamic State militants targeted a football ground, built near a Shiite shrine in the city of Kirkuk. They shot mortar rounds that killed six civilians and injured nine others, on August 24, 2019. In another attack day before, a bike equipped with explosives blasted near a mosque in Shia-majority area of Mussayyib, killing three people and wounding 34.
Shia Muslims Despite being the religious majority in Iraq, Shia Muslims who predominantly inhabit the country's south were killed in large numbers by IS. By June 2014, IS had already claimed to have killed 1,700 Shia Muslims. According to witnesses, after the militant group took the city of Mosul, they divided the Sunni prisoners from the Shia prisoners.
Iraqi Turkmen Iraqi Turkmen generally never got involved in the
Iraqi conflict until the Islamic State began a violent process of persecution against them. They had 200,000 Turkmen displaced, thousands killed, and hundreds still missing. The
Iraqi Turkmen Front stated that the attacks on Turkmens were an
ethnic cleansing attempt.
Christians Iraqi Christians, the majority being ethnic
Assyrians in northern Iraq, have also been targeted by IS. Some were kidnapped and held for ransom. IS fighters destroyed and vandalized many Christian monuments, and they have taken down crosses from the tops of churches, replacing them with IS flags. They marked Christian homes with an Arabic "N" which stands for "Nasrane", a word used by Muslims to describe followers of the Christian faith. torture, slavery, sexual slavery, Afterward, the men were lined up at checkpoints along the side of the road, shot, and bulldozed into mass graves. Many were also sold as sex slaves to IS fighters. There are also reports that women forced into sex slavery were subjected to forced abortions.
Sinjar Massacre The
Sinjar massacre was the killing and abduction of thousands It was also reported that IS fighters executed over ten caretakers of
Shia Sayeda Zeinab shrine in Sinjar before blowing it up. While the siege of Mount Sinjar was continuing, IS killed hundreds of Yazidis in at least six of the nearby villages. 250–300 men were killed in the village of
Hardan, 200 between Adnaniya and Jazeera, 70–90 in Qiniyeh, and on the road out of al-Shimal witnesses reported seeing dozens of bodies. Hundreds of others had also been killed for refusing to convert to Islam. A witness recounted that the villagers were first converted under duress, but when the village elder refused to convert, all of the men were taken in trucks under the pretext of being led to Sinjar, and gunned down along the way. According to reports from survivors interviewed by
OHCHR, on 15 August, the entire male population of the Yazidi village of Khocho, up to 400 men, were rounded up and shot by IS, and up to 1,000 women and children were abducted. On the same day, up to 200 Yazidi men were reportedly executed for refusing conversion in a Tal Afar prison. The massacres took place at least until 25 August when IS executed 14 elderly Yazidi men in
Sheikh Mand Shrine in
Jidala, western Sinjar, and blew up the shrine there. 40,000 or more Yazidis were trapped in the
Sinjar Mountains and mostly surrounded by IS forces who were firing on them. They were largely without food, water or medical care, facing starvation and dehydration.
Human Rights Watch organization reported in 2018 that IS captured approximately 6,300 Yazidis in Sinjar and forced Yazidi women into "a system of organized rape and sexual slavery". civilians had been murdered by IS in Iraq, then however; by 2016 a second report by the United Nations estimated 18,802 deaths. The
Sinjar massacre in 2014 resulted in the killings of between 2,000 and 5,000 civilians.
Attacks on members of the press The
Committee to Protect Journalists states: "Without a free press, few other human rights are attainable." IS has tortured and murdered local journalists, creating what
Reporters Without Borders calls "news blackholes" in areas controlled by IS. IS fighters have reportedly been given written directions to kill or capture journalists. In December 2013, two suicide bombers stormed the headquarters of TV station Salaheddin and killed five journalists, after accusing the station of "distorting the image of Iraq's Sunni community". Reporters Without Borders reported that on 7 September 2014, IS seized and on 11 October publicly beheaded Raad al-Azzawi, a TV Salaheddin cameraman from the village of Samra, east of Tikrit. , according to the Journalistic Freedoms Observatory, IS held nine journalists and has nine others under close observation in Mosul and Salahuddin province. The unit
executed American journalists James Foley and
Steven Sotloff and released beheading videos. Eight of the other journalists were released for ransom: Danish journalist Daniel Rye Ottosen, French journalists Didier François, Edouard Elias,
Nicolas Hénin, and Pierre Torres, and Spanish journalists Marc Marginedas, Javier Espinosa, and Ricardo García Vilanova. The unit continues to hold hostage British journalist
John Cantlie and a female aid worker. Cyber-security group the
Citizen Lab released a report finding a possible link between IS and a digital attack on the Syrian citizen media group
Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently (RSS). Supporters of the media group received an emailed link to an image of supposed airstrikes, but clicking on the link introduced malware to the user's computer that sends details of the user's IP address and system each time it restarts. That information has been enough to allow IS to locate RSS supporters. "The group has been targeted for kidnappings, house raids, and at least one alleged targeted killing. At the time of that writing, IS was allegedly holding several citizen journalists in Raqqa", according to the Citizen Lab report. On 8 January 2015, IS members in Libya claimed to have executed Tunisian journalists
Sofiene Chourabi and Nadhir Ktari who disappeared in September 2014. Also in January 2015, Japanese journalist
Kenji Goto was kidnapped and beheaded, after a demand for a $200 million ransom payment was not met.
Beheadings and mass executions An unknown number of Syrians and Iraqis, several Lebanese soldiers, male and female
Kurdish fighters near
Kobanî, two American journalists, one American and two British aid workers, 30 Ethiopian Christians and 21 Egyptian
Coptic Christians in Libya were
beheaded by IS. The militant group uses beheadings to intimidate local populations and has released a series of propaganda videos aimed at Western countries. IS was reported to have beheaded about 100 foreign fighters as deserters who tried to leave Raqqa. They also engage in public and mass executions of Syrian and Iraqi soldiers and civilians, Among the known mass executions of captured soldiers carried out by IS are those in Tikrit (
IS executed up to 1,700 Shia
Iraqi Air Force cadets from
Camp Speicher near
Tikrit on 12 June 2014),
Tabqa (IS executed 250 Syrian soldiers captured at the
Al-Tabqa air base between 27 and 28 August 2014),
Palmyra (up to 280 Syrian soldiers and government loyalists were shot in the head or beheaded in a public square on 22 May 2015), and
Deir ez-Zor (IS killed at least 300 Syrian soldiers, pro-government militiamen and their families on 16 January 2016). IS executed 600 Shia prisoners in
Mosul in June 2014. In November 2014, there were reports that IS fighters massacred more than 630 members of the
Albu Nimr tribe in Iraq. Albu Nimr was one of the
Sunni Arab tribes that fiercely opposed IS. On 17 December 2014, it was reported by Turkish media, that IS had executed at least 150 women from the Albu Nimr tribe in
Falluja for refusing to marry IS militants.
Use of chemical weapons , Syria, 9 March 2017 In 2014, the Islamic State launched a program to manufacture chemical weapons with chlorine and a
World War I-era toxin which is known as
sulfur mustard. Kurds in northern Iraq reported that IS attacked them with chemical weapons in August 2015, which was later confirmed to be
mustard gas. At Kobanî, it is highly likely that IS used
chlorine gas. These chemical weapons may have been from a chemical weapons storage site at Al-Muthanna, which contained 2,500 chemical rockets. Although the rockets' chemical contents were deteriorated, IS may have used them in a concentrated manner.
Destruction of cultural and religious heritage UNESCO's Director-General
Irina Bokova has warned that IS is destroying Iraq's cultural heritage, in what she has called "
cultural cleansing". "We don't have time to lose because extremists are trying to erase the identity, because they know that if there is no identity, there is no memory, there is no history", she said. Referring to the ancient cultures of Christians, Yazidis and other minorities, she said, "This is a way to destroy identity. You deprive them of their culture, you deprive them of their history, their heritage, and that is why it goes hand in hand with genocide. Along with the physical persecution they want to eliminate – to delete – the memory of these different cultures ... we think this is appalling, and this is not acceptable."
Saad Eskander, head of Iraq's National Archives said, "For the first time you have cultural cleansing... For the Yazidis, religion is oral, nothing is written. By destroying their places of worship... you are killing cultural memory. It is the same with the Christians – it really is a threat beyond belief." in
Palmyra, which was destroyed by IS in August 2015 To finance its activities, IS stole artefacts from Syria and Iraq, sending them to Europe to be sold. UNESCO has asked for
United Nations Security Council controls on the sale of antiquities, similar to those imposed after the 2003
Iraq War. UNESCO is working with
Interpol, national customs authorities, museums, and major auction houses in attempts to prevent looted items from being sold. IS considers worshipping at graves tantamount to
idolatry, and seeks to purify the community of unbelievers. It has used bulldozers to crush buildings and archaeological sites. The destruction by IS in July 2014 of the
tomb and shrine of the prophet Yunus –
Jonah in Christianity – the 13th-century mosque of
Imam Yahya Abu al-Qassimin, the 14th-century shrine of prophet Jerjis –
St George to Christians – and the attempted destruction of the
Hadba minaret at the 12th-century
Great Mosque of Al-Nuri have been described as "an unchecked outburst of extreme Wahhabism". "There were explosions that destroyed buildings dating back to the
Assyrian era", said
National Museum of Iraq director Qais Rashid, referring to the destruction of the shrine of Yunus. He cited another case where "Daesh [IS] gathered over 1,500 manuscripts from convents and other holy places and burnt all of them in the middle of the city square". In March 2015, IS reportedly bulldozed the 13th-century BC Assyrian city of
Nimrud, believing its sculptures to be idolatrous.
UNESCO head,
Irina Bokova, deemed this to be a war crime. IS has burned or stolen collections of books and papers from the various locations including the Central Library of Mosul (which they rigged with explosives and burned down), the library at the
University of Mosul, a Sunni Muslim library, a 265-year-old Latin Church and Monastery of the Dominican Fathers, and the Mosul Museum Library. Some destroyed or stolen works date back to 5000 BCE and include "Iraq newspapers dating to the early 20th century, maps and books from the Ottoman Empire, and book collections contributed by about 100 of Mosul's establishment families." The stated goal is to destroy all non-Islamic books. An investigation led by the
Human Rights Watch disclosed that Al-Hota gorge that was once a beautiful natural site in northeastern
Syria is used by IS as a disposal ground for the bodies of people killed by them. The
HRW investigation involved analysis of evidence such as videos released by the Islamic State, interviews with locals, along with satellite images and drone footages of the gorge. == Treatment of civilians ==