Media outlets reported that a number of Yazidi asylum seekers have been on hunger strike for a week in front of the Bundestag headquarters in the German capital, Berlin, in protest against the decisions to deport them to Iraq.
“Amal, Berlin!” website said on October 17, “Many people began a hunger strike in front of the Bundestag building in Berlin a week ago, in protest against the threat of deporting them to Iraq.”
Some of the hunger strikers were transferred to the hospital due to the deterioration of their health, while others are still continuing their strike in front of the Bundestag, according to the “rbb24” website.
The website quoted one of the protesters as saying that he “does not understand how the Bundestag recognized ISIS’s crimes against the Yazidis as genocide in January and in May, then began deporting people who fled from there.”
One of the strikers warned: “We will not eat until we get a response from the Bundestag.”
Last June, the German parliament, the Bundestag, adopted a memorandum classifying what the Islamic State (ISIS) committed against the Yazidis in northwestern Iraq in 2014 as “genocide,” and recommended a series of assistance measures for this religious minority.
The jihadist group killed thousands of Yazidis, enslaved seven thousand women and girls, and displaced most of the 550,000 minority members from their ancestral homeland in northern Iraq.
The Yazidis are an ancient religious minority in eastern Syria and northwestern Iraq. ISIS considered them devil worshipers because of their faith, which combines Zoroastrianism, Christianity, Manichaeism, Judaism and Islam.
