Ms Nasreen:

Good afternoon everyone. I apologise, my English is not very good. I hope the committee can understand me. I thank the committee members very much for inviting me to participate in this meeting. I am a Yazidi human rights activist and a member of the Yazidi Survivor Network. Perhaps not all the members of the committee may be aware of the Yazidis, so I will begin by defining us as a religious and ethnic minority who live in many parts of the world, but mainly in northern Iraq and specifically in Sinjar. They have been subjected to many genocides, the most recent of which occurred on 3 August 2014 in Sinjar and was perpetrated by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, ISIL, also known as ISIS. As a result of this genocide, thousands of Yazidi men were killed, thousands of women were enslaved, with many subsequently traded by their captors multiple times, children were trained as soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Yazidis were displaced.

I am one of those Yazidi women who has subjected to sexual violence in the form of rape, slavery and physical and psychological torture. In addition, we have lost our beloved family members. More than 5,000 of our fathers, husbands and brothers were shot and buried in mass graves. It has been seven years since the genocide, but about 3,000 Yazidis are still missing, including 14 members of my family, whom I miss very much. There is not enough time to talk about this genocide in detail. I will focus on the Yazidi survivors who have been subjected to one of the most awful crimes in this century. They are also facing many difficulties now following their liberation from ISIL captivity. They have lost everything and they are trying to restore their lives from nothing. Most of them live in tents in IDP camps. Despite all these difficulties, these survivors are very brave and are advocating for their own rights and those of others. They also work very hard in helping the authorities to bring justice for everyone. We are fighting to prevent future genocides from happening to us and everywhere else in the world.

The Yazidi Survivors Network is an example of brave survivors who work on advocating for the rights of Yazidi survivors and the survivors of many other cases. However, to carry out this advocacy work effectively, we require capacity building training courses in different fields.

We were deprived of the opportunity to continue our education because of being in captivity. We need more education to be taken seriously and to be part of the decision-making process, especially on topics that are directly about us.

The main issue we now face in developing the Yazidi Survivors Network is funding. I would like to take this opportunity to ask the committee to support the network members in any possible way so that we can support other survivors and our community in general as much as we can. I thank the committee very much for listening. I am sorry my English is not good.