Thirty-one Yazidi women and their children, victims in Iraq of the Islamic State (IS) group, landed Thursday morning in Toulouse as part of a refugee program in France, the Interior Ministry said.
Mainly "dispatched" in Haute-Vienne and Tarn-et-Garonne
This arrival brings to 75 the number of Yazidi families who arrived in France since the first group in December 2018 (16 women and their children, 83 people in total), followed by another (28 families, 132 people) at the end of May, adds the Ministry in a statement, without specifying the number of children involved this time. "In total, 151 women and children arrived today (Thursday)", for its part told AFP Lionel Pourtau, director general of the section "refugees" at Habitat and Humanism, one of the associations in charge of hospitality logistics.
Arrived from Erbil, in Iraq, at the airport of Toulouse-Blagnac, these women, "particularly tested by the abuses" of the IS, and children will be "taken care of in different French departments" where the State will provide them "protection, security, education and medico-social support," according to the ministry. According to Lionel Pourtau, these people "will be mainly dispatched to Haute-Vienne and Tarn-et-Garonne".
A commitment from Emmanuel Macron
The operation is organized like the previous one by the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and funded by the Ministry of Europe and Foreign Affairs, says Beauvau. According to the ministry, this new reception responds to Emmanuel Macron's "commitment" to Nadia Murad, Nobel Peace Prize winner 2018, to "welcome to the French territory a hundred Yazidi families who have been the victims of the crimes committed by Daesh".
According to him, this approach reflects the "renewed will of France", a member of the international military coalition that has helped the Iraqi government and Syrian militias to militarily defeat ISIS in recent years, to welcome "victims of ethnic violence. and nuns in the Middle East ". A last group of Yazidis should arrive in France in November, according to the head of Habitat and Humanism.
Nearly 3,000 Yazidis missing
In August 2014, according to the UN, the IS carried out a genocidal potential against the Yazidis, a Kurdophone minority with an esoteric monotheistic religion. Within days, the jihadists of the self-proclaimed "Caliphate" had killed hundreds of men in the community, forcibly recruiting child soldiers and reducing thousands of women to sexual slavery. Nearly 3,000 Yazidis are still missing, mostly women and children, perhaps still captive to IS.
Of the 550,000 Yazidis in Iraq before 2014 - a third of Yazidis in the world - 100,000 have been on the road to exile since 2014, mainly in Germany, and 360,000 are still displaced, including in camps where they are helped by authorities and NGOs.