More Than 400 Plaintiffs, Represented By Amal Clooney, Are Suing for "accountability for genocide against Yazidis."
On Thursday (14 December), more than 400 Yazidi-Americans, represented by the famous human rights lawyer Amal Clooney, took legal action in New York, alleging that the French company Lafarge SA had colluded to provide ISIS with resources to wage terrorist attacks against their minority group.
Pledging "to hold Lafarge accountable for its admitted criminal conspiracy with ISIS and to obtain justice for the Yazidi people," Clooney and former ambassador Lee Wolosky have filed a case under the Anti-Terrorism Act in the Eastern District of New York, as stated in a press release from Amal Clooney Media.
There is a sizable Kurdish-speaking religious and ethnic minority known as the Yazidis, who live in both Iraq and Syria. An inestigation report released by the United Nations in 2021 found that the systematic persecution of the Yazidis by ISIS constituted genocide. This persecution includes forced conversion to Islam as well as the slaughter and slavery of thousands of Yazidis.
Lafarge is believed to have supplied cement to ISIS for the construction of tunnels and bunkers where they sheltered members of ISIS and held prisoners, including Yazidis, according to the press release. Lafarge has also admitted to the conspiracy that helped ISIS by giving them millions of dollars in cash.
The principal complainant in this action is none other than the Yazidi human rights campaigner and 2018 Nobel Peace Prize recipient, Nadia Murad.
"Families are survivors of a systematic genocide against the Yazidi people that began in Sinjar, Iraq in 2014," the press release stated, referring to the 426 more plaintiffs who are all American citizens of Yazidi and Iraqi heritage.
This case's facts are "really shocking," Clooney told CNN's Fareed Zakaria on Sunday. “Just when the genocide against the Yazidis was beginning in Iraq, that ISIS committed, this company that had already been funding ISIS for a year ramped up its support for ISIS.”
The attorney said that Raqqah, the hub of the slave trade where Yazidis, including women and girls, were enslaved, was just 52 miles away from the Syrian facility that Lafarge was using.
Victims will be able to "rebuild their lives and also to be able to go back" to their displaced houses in Iraq, according to Clooney, who added that compensation would be provided to them.
“This is the first meaningful chance for compensation for these victims of ISIS,” she said.
The United States has branded ISIS as a terrorist group. In August 2014, the UN reported that more than 400,000 Yazidis were forcibly removed from their homes in Iraq by ISIS.
"To remind the world about horrific crimes ISIS committed against Yazidis and to prevent this from happening again," Murad told CNN, emphasizing the importance of her continuing to tell her story.
According to her, ISIS committed genocide during which they murdered her mother, four brothers, and other relatives.
Thousands of other girls and women, according to Murad, are still missing, and she and other single women were sex slaves sold to other ISIS soldiers.
The complaint alleges Lafarge’s support for the terrorist campaign remained steady and even increased during the peak of ISIS’s brutality in the Middle East, “as ISIS publicized beheadings of U.S. citizens and journalists and began its campaign of executions, rape, and terror against Yazidi civilians,” the news release said.
Those "who were injured by ISIS, owned land and homes that were destroyed, or had family members who were displaced, injured, kidnapped, or killed by ISIS" are among the many claimants named in the press release. According to Clooney's interview with CNN, many of the plaintiffs are Yazidi-Americans who have moved to Nebraska.
The worldwide producer of construction materials Lafarge SA pled guilty in 2022 to a US Department of Justice prosecution charging the company with conspiring to give material support to international terrorist groups.
"In exchange for permission to operate a cement plant in Syria from 2013 to 2014," the DOJ news release states, citing Lafarge SA's admission, the company had given nearly $6 million to ISIS and another terror organization, the Al-Nusra Front.
Lafarge admitted guilt and agreed to pay the US around $777 million in forfeiture and criminal charges.
However, the news release clarified that the victims have not received compensation from any of the funds.