| April 2007 Yazidi massacre | |
|---|---|
| Part of the Iraqi civil war (2006–2008) | |
 Al-Hamdaniya District, Nineveh Governorate | |
| Location | Mosul, Al-Hamdaniya District, Iraq |
| Date | April 22, 2007 2:00pm (UTC+03:00) |
| Target | Yazidis |
Attack type | Massacre, Ethnic violence |
| Deaths | 23 |
| Perpetrators | Unknown |
The April 2007 Yazidi massacre was a massacre of Yazidis that took place on April 22, 2007, in Mosul, in northern Iraq.
At around 2PM (GMT+3), a bus carrying workers from the Mosul Textile Factory en route to Bashiqa, Al-Hamdaniya District was stopped by cars owned by unidentified attackers. With the bus now stationary, the attackers got on, and checked the passengers' identity cards. According to Iraqi police, after checking their identification, the armed gunmen told the Muslim and Christian passengers to get off the bus. They then drove the bus to eastern Mosul with 23 remaining passengers, all Yazidis, where the hostages were made to lie face down in front of a wall and shot, execution-style. [1] [2]
According to The New York Times , hundreds of Yazidis from Bashiqa gathered in the street to protest the killings. [2]
Human rights in post-invasion Iraq have been the subject of concerns and controversies since the 2003 U.S. invasion. Concerns have been expressed about conduct by insurgents, the U.S.-led coalition forces and the Iraqi government. The U.S. is investigating several allegations of violations of international and internal standards of conduct in isolated incidents by its own forces and contractors. The UK is also conducting investigations of alleged human rights abuses by its forces. War crime tribunals and criminal prosecution of the numerous crimes by insurgents are likely years away. In late February 2009, the U.S. State Department released a report on the human rights situation in Iraq, looking back on the prior year (2008).
Events in the year 2007 in Iraq.
Du'a Khalil Aswad was a 17-year-old Iraqi girl of the Yazidi faith who was stoned to death in Bashiqa, Ninawa, northern Iraq in early April 2007, the victim of an honor killing. It is believed that she was killed around 7 April 2007, but the incident did not come to light until video of the stoning, apparently recorded on multiple cell phones, appeared on the Internet. The rumor that the stoning was connected to her alleged conversion to Islam prompted reprisals against Yazidis by Sunnis, including the 2007 Mosul massacre.
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The following lists events that happened during 2014 in Iraq.
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The Timeline of the War in Iraq covers the War in Iraq, a war which erupted that lasted in Iraq from 2013 to 2017, during the first year of armed conflict.
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Shia Muslims have been persecuted by the Islamic State, an Islamic extremist group, since 2014. Persecutions have taken place in Iraq, Syria, and other parts of the world.
The Yazidi genocide was perpetrated by the Islamic State throughout Iraq and Syria between 2014 and 2017. It was characterized by massacres, genocidal rape, and forced conversions to Islam. The Yazidi people, who are non-Arabs, are indigenous to Kurdistan and adhere to Yazidism, which is an Iranian religion derived from the Indo-Iranian tradition. Over a period of three years, Islamic State militants trafficked thousands of Yazidi women and girls and killed thousands of Yazidi men; the United Nations reported that the Islamic State killed about 5,000 Yazidis and trafficked about 10,800 Yazidi women and girls in a "forced conversion campaign" throughout Iraq. By 2015, upwards of 71% of the global Yazidi population was displaced by the genocide, with most Yazidi refugees having fled to Iraq's Kurdistan Region and Syria's Rojava. The persecution of Yazidis, along with other religious minorities, took place after the Islamic State's Northern Iraq offensive of June 2014.
The Battle of Mosul was a major battle initiated by the Iraqi Government forces with allied militias, the Kurdistan Regional Government, and international forces to retake the city of Mosul from the Islamic State (ISIL), which had seized the city years prior in June of 2014. It was the largest conventional land battle since the capture of Baghdad in 2003, it was also the world's single largest military operation overall since the 2003 invasion of Iraq and was considered the toughest urban battle since World War II. The operation, which was called Operation "We Are Coming, Nineveh", began on 16 October 2016, with forces besieging ISIL-controlled areas in the Nineveh Governorate surrounding Mosul, and continued with Iraqi troops and Peshmerga fighters engaging ISIL on three fronts outside Mosul, going from village to village in the surrounding area in the largest deployment of Iraqi troops since the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
The persecution of Yazidis has been ongoing since at least 637 CE. Yazidis are an endogamous and mostly Kurmanji-speaking minority, indigenous to Kurdistan. The Yazidi religion is regarded as "devil-worship" by Muslims and Islamists. Yazidis have been persecuted by the surrounding Muslims since the medieval ages, most notably by Safavids, Ottomans, neighbouring Muslim Arab and Kurdish tribes and principalities. After the 2014 Sinjar massacre of thousands of Yazidis by ISIL, which started the ethnic, cultural, and religious genocide of the Yazidis in Iraq, Yazidis still face discrimination from the Iraqi government and the Kurdistan Regional Government.
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