Fighting to bring ISIS to justice

Nadia (not her real name) was among thousands of Yazidis captured by ISIS in August 2014 when the terror group launched an assault on Sinjar, then home to more than half a million members of this minority group.

In the days that followed, ISIS fighters split up families, executed the men and declared the women their slaves.

Nadia and and her older sister Amira were separated from the rest of the family. Their mother was pregnant at the time, and Nadia doesn’t know where she – or her baby – is now.

The sisters were bused to several Iraqi towns like cattle, she recalls. They were taken to Mosul and locked up in one of Saddam Hussein’s former palaces.

It was here, Nadia says, that she witnessed an incident that still haunts her: ISIS militants took a child away from his mother as she screamed for him. Her captors responded by hitting her on the head. Nadia still doesn’t know what happened to the pair at the hands of the terrorists.

“They would tell us we sold you, we bought you,” she says. “There were days we would wish we would die so no one says they sold us … Beating and everything else is bearable, but not selling.”

Collecting victims’ stories

An Iraqi Kurdish investigator who asked to be identified as Shaima has heard stories like Nadia’s dozens of times as she interviews freed Yazidis. “Some of them are eager to tell their story. Some of them are reluctant because they can’t go into the details — it’s difficult for them,” she says.

Shaima is a member of the Daesh Criminal Investigations Unit (DCIU), a team of Iraqi Kurdish and western investigators who have been operating secretly in Northern Iraq, for more than two years, collecting evidence of ISIS’ war crimes.

The DCIU works for the Commission for International Justice and Accountability (CIJA), an organization based in Europe, its exact location kept secret for security reasons.

Their task in Iraq is dangerous — the terror group remains at large despite losing most of the territory it once controlled.

“We will put the danger aside,” Shaima told CNN. “The purpose we are serving is much bigger than to think about the danger.”

Investigators have collected thousands of documents, phone records and videos left behind by the militants after they ravaged much of northern Iraq.

Earlier this month, CNN conducted exclusive interviews with the team in Iraq and toured its European office.

‘Utter depravity’ of ISIS

Bill Wiley, a Canadian criminal lawyer, is CIJA’s founder. He has been investigating war crimes for more than two decades, in places like Rwanda, the Balkans and in the Eastern Congo. He says he’s never seen anything like the “creativity” of ISIS’ crimes, including murder, torture and sexual offenses.

“In creativity they are absolutely unique, the throwing of homosexuals or suspected homosexuals off tall buildings, sexual slavery in an organized way,” Wiley told CNN.

And so callous are the ISIS captors, he adds, that they have been known to execute Yazidi women judged too old to exploit as sex slaves.

“The utter depravity of Islamic State is something that has taken my colleagues and certainly myself aback,” he says.

Wiley’s team has two cases ready for prosecution; they have identified two dozen ISIS members and leaders linked to the persecution of Yazidis. Isis leader Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, his deputies and other leaders and members are among the suspects.

Calls for special tribunal

While CIJA has been pushing for the establishment of a specialized ISIS tribunal in Northern Iraq, exactly where and how these cases will be heard is tangled up in the complexities of politics and differences between the central government in Baghdad and the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in Erbil.

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