Nazi crime researchers probing ISIL over Yazidi 'genocide'

A group that documented Nazi war crimes is now investigating whether massacres committed by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) jihadists against Iraq's Yazidi minority amount to genocide.

Three European researchers have embarked on the gargantuan task of establishing that ISIL crimes aimed to systematically wipe out an ethnic group, in a bid to push the international community to halt the brutal crimes.
 
"We are not seeking to be sensational but to establish the stages of the criminal process for each category of the Yazidi -- men, women, children -- in order to back up the claim of genocide," Andrej Umansky, criminal law specialist at Cologne University, told AFP.
 
The Yazidis are neither Arabs nor Muslims and have a unique faith which ISIL jihadists consider to be heretical and polytheistic. The Kurdish-speaking minority is mostly based around Sinjar mountain in northern Iraq.
 
When the jihadists made an unexpected push in August last year into parts of northern Iraq under Kurdish control, the Yazidis were the worst hit, with many massacred and abducted.
 
The small European team from Yahad In Unum -- an association that collected evidence of Nazi slaughters of Jews and Roma in former Soviet areas -- has travelled to collect evidence at a Kurdish refugee camp just 20 kilometres (12 miles) from the frontline where battle was raging with ISIL militants.
 
Since August, they have filmed 50 interviews with Yazidi men, women and children who have managed to flee the terror of ISIL.
 
While the witness accounts could be used to back up future legal proceedings, "our first aim is to stop this crime" which is still being perpetrated, said Umansky.
 
"Imagine if we had questioned...