US Offers Police Training To Protect Yazidi Survivors Of Islamic State Terror- State Dept.

WASHINGTON (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 07th August, 2020) The United States stands ready to help the Kurdistan Regional Government in northern Iraq recruit and train police recruited from depopulated areas where Christian and Yazidi religious fled a murderous rampage by the Islamic State terror group (banned in Russia) six years earlier, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Joey Hood said on Friday.

"We're ready to help train equip and support the type of police force reported from local communities," Hood told guests at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars.

Hood said the United States is also "ready to direct more assistance to the Nineva Plane and to Sinjar once we have security forces and an administration" that it can work with.

In the summer of 2014, Islamic State terrorists swept across the Nineva Plane in northern Iraq, killing members of Christian and Yazidi households that refused to convert to islam. In the process they seized thousands of women and girls for forced marriages to fighters - 3,000 of whom remain missing.

Hood described areas where thriving Yazidi and Christian communities once existed as now subject to mafia-like rule by armed gangs that demand bribes at checkpoints and protection money from businesses - an obstacle to the return of hundreds of thousands who have sent years in Iraqi camps.