PKK abducting women in Iraq’s Sinjar: Local official

By Muhammet Kursun

KIRKUK, Iraq

The PKK terrorist organization is abducting Yazidi girls and women in the Sinjar District of Iraq’s northern Nineveh province, according to Veyis Naif, head of Sinjar’s local council.

Speaking exclusively to Anadolu Agency, Naif said that PKK terrorists had recently abducted 45 Yazidi women in Sinjar.

Since late 2015, the official added, the PKK had taken as many as 550 Yazidis -- against their will -- to the Qandil Mountain region, a PKK stronghold in Iraq’s northern Kurdish region near the Iranian border.

Yazidis are an ethnically Kurdish religious group indigenous to the northern Mesopotamia region.

According to Naif, there is "no difference" between the PKK’s practice of abducting Yazidi women and girls and the persecution meted out to Yazidis by the Daesh terrorist group, which controlled Sinjar from mid-2014 to late 2015.

"Along with torching our homes and killing our sons, Daesh abducted and dishonored our girls," he asserted. "What the PKK is doing is no different."

Naif went on to say that the PKK -- which played a role in recapturing Sinjar from Daesh late last year -- posed a "major threat" to the entire region.

"The PKK spells trouble for the whole region and its people," he said. "They must leave Sinjar."

"We don’t want the PKK here; we already have eight different groups of [Kurdish] peshmerga forces [in Sinjar]," he added.

"The PKK’s behavior in Sinjar is that of invader," the official went on. "PKK terrorists have occupied a number of local government buildings, even schools."

Last November, peshmerga forces and Yazidi militias -- backed by U.S.-led coalition airstrikes -- retook the district from Daesh.

According to the UN, Daesh committed numerous atrocities against the local Yazidi community in the 15 months that it held Sinjar.

In a report issued last year, the UN said that "hundreds" of Yazidi men and boys had been killed by Daesh when the terrorist group overran Nineveh in August of 2014.

The UN report went on to assert that Daesh militants had routinely raped Yazidi women and girls.

* Sibel Ugurlu contributed to this story from Ankara.