French ambassador to Iraq visits Shengal

The French Ambassador to Iraq visited the Yazidi town of Shengal (Sinjar) in southern Kurdistan (northern Iraq).

Eric Chevalier, French Ambassador to Iraq, examined on-site the construction of a hospital in Shengal, funded by the French government.

“We visited this place three months ago,” Chevalier said during the visit. “We are now seeing rapid and significant developments in the construction of the hospital. We would like to thank the company that builds the hospital and those who work for its construction,” Chevalier added.

Throughout history, the Ezidi community has been confronted with hundreds of massacres and genocidal acts carried out against them. The biggest and most brutal ones of them, counted 74 in number, are discussed a lot and have branded the Ezidis’ collective memory forever. The world knows the Ezidi people rather because of genocides than by their culture and belief – a painful reality for the Ezidis. The 74th genocidal act was carried out in the year 2014 by Daesh, the so- called Islamic State group. Without doubt this genocide caused lots of pain, trauma and deep losses within the Ezidi community. Tens of thousands of Ezidi were murdered, abducted and taken as slaves. Children were forcibly recruited as child soldiers. On top of that, hundreds of thousands of inhabitants of Shengal were expelled from their homeland. Until today, about 200.000 of them live under miserable conditions in camps in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq.