Ireland and the Yazidi struggle for justice after IS ravaged their homeland

Tired and broken, the Yazidi community fear their chance for justice against IS is slipping away, writes Hannah McCarthy

Yazidi women from an internally displaced persons' camp in Kurdistan in Iraq at Lalesh Temple. In 2014 IS killed an estimated 5,000 Yazidis and abducted and sexually enslaved about 7,000 Yazidis, mostly women, and children. Yazidis were forced to convert to Islam, many of their religious and cultural sites were destroyed, and 450,000 people fled from their homes to escape the violence.

Faced with hopeless living conditions in camps in Kurdistan, several Yazidi families were among the thousands of migrants who travelled to the bitterly cold Polish border last month. They were given hope of an easy crossing into Europe by the Belarusian government, which callously used them to put pressure on EU states to remove sanctions placed on Belarus, after it forcibly diverted a Ryanair plane to arrest a journalist last year.

Instead of finding refuge in Europe, Yazidis families were violently pushed back from the border by Polish troops and then deported from Belarus. They have now returned – broken and in debt - to the camps in Kurdistan (a devolved region of Iraq).