Two Yazidi women rescued from Syria's al-Hol Camp, reunited with families in Kurdistan

Shafaq News/ Two Yazidi women, abducted by Islamic State (ISIS) militants during the 2014 Sinjar massacre, have been rescued from Syria’s Al-Hol camp and reunited with their families in the Kurdistan Region, a Kurdish official said on Monday.

Hussein al-Qaedi, head of the Kurdistan Region’s Kidnapped Affairs Office, told Shafaq News that the two women, both named Khunaf but from different villages, were abducted by ISIS militants when they overran Sinjar in 2014. One is 10 years old and from the Kojo village, while the other is 24 and from the Tel Aziz complex.

“The President of the Kurdistan Region, Nechirvan Barzani, continues his tireless efforts to search for and rescue Yazidi women and children still held captive by ISIS,” al-Qaedi said. He criticized the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) for not cooperating sufficiently in these efforts, stressing that this operation is purely humanitarian and has no political agenda.

The mother of one of the rescued women expressed her joy at being reunited with her daughter, who was only three months old when she was abducted. “I have waited a long time to live this moment of meeting her, thank God, and thank everyone who helped us,” she told Shafaq News Agency.

ISIS overran the Sinjar, historic home of the Yazidi community, district in 2014, carrying out systemic extermination of the minority. The district was later recaptured by the Peshmerga forces, but Iraqi forces backed by the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) took control of it following tensions between the Kurdistan Region and the federal government over the 2017 independence referendum.