The Yazidi Supreme Spiritual Council said children born to Yazidi mothers raped by ISIS militants will not be accepted into the Yazidi faith.
The council had said earlier that all Yazidis would be accepted back considering "what happened to them outside of their will." It also sent a delegation to Syria to look for Yazidis who had escaped ISIS.
However, the council released a statement clarifying its previous comments saying: “About the decision to accept the female survivors and children, we did not mean the children born as a result of rape at all, but those who were born from Yazidi parents and were kidnapped during the invasion of Sinjar by ISIS.”
ISIS slaughtered thousands of Yazidis and buried them in mass graves during its Iraq and Syria invasion in 2014. Women were abducted and sold into sexual slavery.
Yazidis do not accept children within their community unless they are born to Yazidi parents.
There are no reliable figures for the number of Yazidi children or for the number of unregistered children in the Iraqi departments since 2014.
