The United Nations Security Council took proactive measures Friday to condemn the genocidal behavior of the jihadist terror group the Islamic State, blacklisting six individuals believed or confirmed to work with the terrorist group and threatening sanctions against those with financial or military ties to the Islamic State.
Al Arabiya reports that the Security Council issued a binding resolution that would prevent six individuals, including Islamic State spokesman Abu Mohammad al-Adnani, from traveling internationally. It would also issue an arms embargo and asset freeze on them, as well as the greater organization, which had been blacklisted previously.
The resolution also takes a moral stance against the group, stating the UN “deplores and condemns in the strongest terms the terrorist acts of [the Islamic State] and its violent extremist ideology, and its continued gross, systematic and widespread abuses of human rights and violations of international humanitarian law.”
In addition to the actions by the Security Council, the United Nations generally has called the situation in Iraq a Level 3 “humanitarian emergency“, which would “facilitate mobilisation of additional resources in goods, funds, and assets, according to UN special representative Nickolay Mladenov. The organization also condemned the “barbaric” acts of the Islamic State, particularly against Iraq’s minority populations. The Islamic State has swept through northern Iraq on a mission to eliminate Shi’ite Muslims, Christians, and Yazidis in what is described with increasing frequency as a “genocide.” In Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, the Islamic State ordered Christians to accept living as second-class citizens and paying a jizya, or infidel’s tax, leave the city, or be killed. There are currently believed to be no Christians living in the city.
In the Sinjar area, the Islamic State has attempted to eliminate the Yazidi minority, ethnic Kurds who follow a faith that has elements of Islam, Christianity, and Zoroastrianism. The Islamic State has been massacring Yazidi men and abducting Yazidi women, in many cases selling them into the slave trade. Thousands of Yazidis fleeing certain death climbed Mount Sinjar without food and water, finding themselves trapped between the severity of life without resources on the northern mountain or a brutal murder by Islamic State jihadists below. While the United States military and others have responded to the crisis with military air resources and humanitarian aid, it is believed that many Yazidis remain on the mountain or displaced elsewhere in the region.
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