Siranush Ghazanchyan
Member of the Armenian National Assembly Rustam Bakoyan joined Yazidis in Sinjar to mourn the victims of 2014 genocide.
The city of Sinjar saw the re-burial of the remains of more than 100 Yazidis who were massacred by the Islamic State in the summer of 2014.
“In Sinjar’s Kocho village we are participating in the burial of the victims of our genocide. Yazidis from around the world have gathered here,” the MP said through Facebook Live.
“My heart, soul and mind are in the village of Kocho in Sinjar and part of my existence is now buried with our mothers and sisters, fathers and brothers in this fraternal grave. The pain is abnormal,” said Bakoyan, who represents Armenia’s Yazidi community at the National Assembly.
Earlier this week an official funeral ceremony was held in Baghdad’s Celebration Square to bid farewell to the remains of 104 Yazidi genocide victims, Al-Monitor reports.
The remains were excavated from some of the more than 80 mass graves in Sinjar, of which only a few have been opened. DNA tests to identify the victims were conducted by the Iraqi Medico-Legal Department of the Martyrs Foundation, in cooperation with the International Commission on Missing Persons and the United Nations Investigative Team to Promote Accountability for Crimes Committed by IS.
The majority of this first set of victims hailed from Kocho, whose entire male population was killed, while women and children were captured. On Aug. 15, 2014, IS massacred more than 400 men and threw them in four mass graves around the village. The next day, they killed more than 80 elderly women and threw their bodies in what is now known as “the mothers’ grave,” south of the city of Sinjar. Also, more than 1,000 women, girls and children were taken captive and sold in slave markets in Mosul, Raqqa and Tal Afar.
Official statistics indicate that IS’s attack on Yazidis in Sinjar displaced more than 350,000 civilians and killed and captured more than 10,000 unarmed civilians. This is while the fate of nearly 2,880 captivated women and children is still unknown. The war totally destroyed the neglected city of Sinjar, which is located on the Iraqi-Syrian border. More than 70% of its people cannot return home due to the lack of services and insecurity, and because it turned into a regional conflict arena in the absence of a unified administration.
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