Yazidi Leader: 'Thousands' of ISIS Suicide Bombers Can Attack 'Anywhere in the World'

Mirza Dinnayi, senior Yazidi leader and a former adviser on minority affairs to the president of Iraq, told the audience at a conference this week he fears the radical jihadist group the Islamic State could strike anywhere, due to the “thousands of suicide bombers.”

Dinnayi made the comments, the Jerusalem Post reports, at a conference in Herzliya, Israel, where he outlined the dangers of the Islamic State that he believes many are underestimating. Speaking while on crutches, as Dinnayi broke his leg when a helicopter participating in a Yazidi relief effort in Iraq crashed, he warned that underestimating the jihadist group could be fatal to more than one nation. “The Islamic State has no nuclear capability, but it has thousands of suicide bombers that can attack people anywhere in the world,” he said, noting that its destructive tendencies continue to threaten thousands, if not millions, of ethnic and religious minorities in Iraq and Syria.

Dinnayi noted that much of the persecution of Yazidis and other religious minorities occurred after Christians began fleeing the wrath of the terrorist group. “Christians chose to leave the Islamic State and in response it began attacking the various minorities that remained,” he said. 

Dinnayi added an accusation that many have made regarding funding and support for the group: that Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar have all had a hand in funding the group. Turkey, in particular, has been signaled out as a safe haven from which terrorists entering Syria from the West can cross. These claims have come from Islamic State fighters themselves, who say Turkey has been “understanding” towards them.

The Yazidi minority in Iraq, ethnic Kurds who follow a unique religion based in Zoroastrianism, are considered “devil worshippers” by Islamic State terrorists for their belief that Lucifer is not the Devil, but a being referred to as the Peacock Angel who rules over the earth. As infidels, the Islamic State has gone to great lengths to eliminate them, in what Yazidi leaders refer to as the 73rd genocide against their people.

Mass graves found in northern Iraq indicate that the Islamic State has attempted to kill Yazidis en masse by burying them alive; women and girls have been taken by the hundreds as “war booty” and used or sold as slaves after being kidnapped from northern villages. Fleeing from the Islamic State’s attempts to eradicate them, thousands of Yazidis climbed up the dangerous Mount Sinjar, where they remained for days without food and water. Many died of starvation and thirst before Kurdish forces, along with United States air support, opened a path down the mountain for the survivors to flee.