A German state announced the suspension of the deportation of Yazidi women and children to Iraq, until next April, making it the second state to take this decision within a month, in an attempt to alleviate the fears of the Yazidis about the possibility of their deportation since the signing of the immigration agreement between Germany and Iraq.
The Office of the Immigration Commissioner in the state of Thuringia announced on Thursday, January 4, in Erfurt that the regulation will initially be applied until April of this year, according to the “InfoMigrants” website.
Many Yazidis in Germany live in daily fear of deportation, especially since the immigration agreement the federal government concluded with Iraq last year.
According to the German Ministry of the Interior, approximately 26,000 Iraqi refugees were asked to leave Germany, but as of the end of October 2023, 164 people had been deported to Iraq, but it was not clear how many of the deportees were Yazidis, while during 2022, 77 people were deported.
Last month, the state of North Rhine-Westphalia announced a ban on the deportation of Yazidi women and children, given that their conditions in northern Iraq are still “worrying” and they lack the necessary protection, amid political demands to ban the deportation of this group in all German states.
At the beginning of 2023, the Bundestag unanimously recognized the persecution and systematic killing of Yazidis in northern Iraq by the terrorist “Islamic State” militia as genocide.
However, many Yazidi refugees are denied asylum because the individual case of persecution is not considered sufficient, Commissioner Miriam Krupa said. She called on the federal government to grant Yazidi refugees from Iraq safe residency status.
The German Parliament (Bundestag) approved a memorandum condemning what the “Islamic State” (ISIS) committed against the Yazidis in Iraq. In the memorandum, issued on January 19, 2023, German representatives classified these violations as “genocide.”
Girls and women were subjected to “enslavement, rape, and trafficking,” as the parliamentary memorandum adds, indicating that “sexual violence… aims to dehumanize, humiliate, and fragment societies.” Accordingly, “the House of Representatives (Bundestag) considers the crimes committed against the Yazidi community to be genocide.”
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.
Germany, which has the largest Yazidi community in the world, is one of the few countries that has taken a judicial course regarding the practices of the “Islamic State” organization against this minority.
It is noteworthy that ten years have passed since the mass killing and expulsion of Yazidi families. Although ISIS has been defeated, the situation in the areas where the Yazidis live remains precarious.
