Daesh: Genocide of Minorities

Natalie McGarry Excerpts

Wednesday 20th April 2016 Commons Chamber

[Natalie McGarry (Glasgow East) (Ind)]

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker, for allowing me to speak on a motion that is of supreme importance to me personally. I congratulate the hon. Member for Congleton (Fiona Bruce) on securing the debate and echo her thanks for the work done in the House of Lords in the past few years to bring this issue to the attention of the UK population and us in this place. I also thank the Backbench Business Committee for allowing this debate to take place.

I wanted to write a speech that would provide evidence that this was a genocide, but that has been covered by other Members, including the hon. Members for Liverpool, West Derby (Stephen Twigg), for Eastbourne (Caroline Ansell) and for Congleton. Therefore, I will focus my remarks on my experience and why this subject is so important to me, and why it is so important to us as a humanitarian country—a country that believes in human rights.

As a Member of Parliament, I have, over the past eight or nine months, travelled to Rojava, in Syria, to the Kurdistan Regional Government region of Iraq and to Turkey. I have been to the refugee camps of the Yazidi people: I have been to the Nowruz camp in Rojava and to refugee camps outside Batman and Diyarbakir in Turkey. I have spoken to many men, women and children—Yazidis and Alevis—who have been affected by the actions of Daesh. Their lives have been inexorably and demonstrably changed by what has happened to them in their communities and in their countries. It is that experience that brings me here to the Chamber today to speak and to show how what is happening is genocide.

I was in Rojava for eight days. I met members of the organisation Yekitiya Star, to which other Members have referred, in which Kurdish women—Muslims, not Yazidi women—work with Yazidi women to try to bring back those women who have been abducted, raped and brutalised. They have experienced barbarism. Those women who have had these terrible experiences—the worst experiences—are ashamed to return to their communities because of what has happened to them. Children of nine and 10 have been raped and impregnated. They are victims of a brutal system that demeans religions and demeans people. The system is about bringing them to account. Those women spoke powerfully to all of us who were there in Rojava. They told us that people from the Kurdish movement in Rojava were buying back women at auctions, using the resources of Rojava to bring women back from slavery. Sometimes they were found out. Sometimes Daesh worked out that they were trying to stop the enslavement by buying back the women. In such cases, those women disappeared. These are powerful stories of what is happening to women and men in that area.

I had a perfectly crafted speech to read out, but I have decided to speak freely. Yesterday, I listened to the testimony of Ekhlas, a 15-year-old who was abducted from her house. I will not paraphrase what she said, as I took down her words directly. I will read out her testimony, as her voice and the voice of the Yazidi and Alevi women deserve to be heard in this place. If anyone wants to intervene on me, could they do so now, as I will read out Ekhlas’s words.

“There was a knock at our door. We were targeted because our religion and belief is different from theirs, and our humanity is different from theirs, because we believe in the Angel Taus. In our religion, we do not believe in rape. We do not believe that innocents should be killed, or that a child should be cut up and his mother forced to eat him. My father and my two brothers were killed in front of me. They took me away from my mother. He grabbed my arm and my leg and then he raped me. He was 32 years old; I was 15. After they raped me, they took my friend and they raped her. I could hear her shouting, ‘Where is the mercy? Where is the mercy? There must be some mercy in their hearts.’ They killed the men and they took the girls. Any girls over the age of nine were raped—like me. What does a nine year understand about sex or rape? What did she do to deserve this? I saw this nine-year-old girl raped with my own eyes, by not one man but several. I saw her die”

because her body could not handle the brutality.

“We saw a two-year-old boy killed, then ground in to meat and fed to his mother who did not know what she was eating.”

Some younger girls were taken. She said:

“Some young girls were impregnated, and were only children. What are they going to do as pregnant children? There is so much brainwashing. Daesh tell you your religion and brainwash children”.

They arm them, and they

“put them in front of their own parents and demand that they kill them. Listen to me, I am begging you. Listen to me, listen to what I am telling. Help us. I beg of you. Listen to me. Help the girls who are still in captivity. Let us all stand hand-in-hand and take a stand. This is a genocide against Christians and Yazidis”—

and others—

“This is about dignity, this is about humanity in dignity. If you are a mother, a father, a brother, a sister, a human, do not close your ears. I plead with you, please listen.”

This is a genocide.