Iraq issues salaries to over 2,200 Yazidi ISIS survivors, launches Shingal projects: Official
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ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - Iraq has issued monthly salaries to more than 2,200 Yazidi women and girls who survived Islamic State (ISIS) atrocities and has launched numerous reconstruction and development projects in the Yazidi heartland of Shingal (Sinjar) in Nineveh province, an advisor to the prime minister said on Tuesday.
Khalaf Shingali, advisor to Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani for Yazidi affairs, told Rudaw that 2,428 Yazidi women and girls are covered under the Yazidi Survivors Law (YSL), including 809 living in the Kurdistan Region and 1,619 outside the country, adding that monthly salaries have been allocated to 2,216 survivors so far.
Iraq's parliament passed the YSL in 2021, aiming to provide assistance to victims of ISIS atrocities. The law formally recognizes acts of genocide and crimes against humanity perpetrated by ISIS against the Yazidi, Christian, Turkmen, and Shabak communities. It envisages a fixed salary, the provision of land, and allocates two percent of public sector jobs.
One of Shingal's long-standing issues - land ownership - is also being addressed, according to Shingali, who said that Baghdad plans to issue 14,000 property deeds across 11 Yazidi communities, with 2,000 deeds to be distributed in the coming days, including 224 for female survivors.
He said 89 reconstruction and development projects have been approved, with work already underway on 23 of them. The federal government has also committed to building a 100-bed hospital in the center of Shingal and another hospital in the Sinune subdistrict.
Additional projects include the establishment of Sinjar University and a strategic water project linking Shingal with Baaj and Rabia, with a budget of over one trillion dinars (about $764 million), according to Shingali. Planned agricultural projects are also expected to benefit thousands of farmers and generate job opportunities.
To ease the ongoing housing crisis, the government will also begin constructing new residential communities in the Sinjar district, he said.
ISIS launched a brutal offensive across swathes of northern and western Iraq in June 2014. By August, the group began its onslaught on the Yazidi community in their heartland of Shingal in Nineveh province, killing an estimated 5,000 to 10,000 Yazidi men and older women.
The jihadists also abducted some 7,000 women and girls for sexual slavery and human trafficking. Around 400,000 Yazidis were forced to flee, with most seeking refuge in the Kurdistan Region, according to data from the Office for Rescuing Abducted Yazidis, operating under the Kurdistan Region Presidency.
The Yazidis were subjected to heinous atrocities under ISIS's brutal rule, including mass killings. The jihadists brought destruction to many villages and towns populated by the community and committed genocide.
The United Nations and several Western countries have recognized ISIS's crimes against the Yazidis as genocide.
Although Iraq declared the full liberation of its territory from ISIS in 2017, around 21,000 Yazidi families remain displaced, primarily in camps in the Kurdistan Region's Duhok province.
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