COPENHAGEN, Denmark – Mogens Lykketoft, the Danish MP designated as the next head of the UN General Assembly, says strong action is needed to ensure that thousands of kidnapped women held by the Islamic State (ISIS) are found and returned to their former lives.
“The use of captured women as slaves is abominable and extremely barbaric,” said Lykketoft, who is the current head of the Danish Parliament and the former foreign minister.
“We should by all means and at all potential avenues seek to bring this barbarism to an end,” he told Rudaw.
ISIS attacked and captured the Kurdish Yezidi town of Shingal last August and according to a parliamentary report the group still holds captive around 4,000 Yezidi women. Some are believed to have been sold to rich Arab businessmen and trafficked to other Middle Eastern countries.
Lykketoft said he believes the international community should call on Arab governments to look for the girls.
"We must strongly urge these countries to solve such crimes and to ensure that women are sent back to their relatives,” said Lykketoft, who is backed in this mission by Per Stig Moller, the former foreign minister and current chairman of the Danish parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee, as well as several MPs.
"We must do the same as Sweden has done," Moller said.
Last October, Swedish MPs announced they would take the lead in efforts to spur international action to locate and protect women who have fallen into ISIS hands or displaced by the conflicts in Iraq and Syria.
Désirée Pethrus, a Christian Democratic MP in Sweden, along with eight Swedish MPs, asked Swedisn Foreign Minister Margot Wahlström to press the UN to investigate and identify the missing women in Iraq and Syria.
“To prevent the further genocide, rape and abduction of women and girls into sex slavery and the sex industry, the Syrian civil war and ISIS must be stopped. Sweden must take their share of responsibility for this,” the MPs wrote in a letter to the Swedish foreign minister in October.
To raise awareness and lobbying for an investigation into the whereabouts of the women, Yildiz Akdogan, an MP in Denmark who is originally a Kurd from Turkey, is preparing a lecture at the parliament's Committee on Foreign Affairs.
”We need both as single country and the EU and the UN to make a much greater effort to help these abducted Yezidi girls," Akdogan told Rudaw. "It's so terrible and I can’t imagine what horrors they are witnessing.”
Turkey and a number of Arab Gulf states have been criticized for either allowing private donations to ISIS or not doing enough to stop militants from the extremist organization crossing the Turkish border into Syria.
According to Nikolaj Villumsen, MP for the leftist Unity List party, Denmark should put pressure on Turkey and the Gulf States over the fate of the missing women.
“We must put pressure on these countries to help us find and free the Yezidi girls and women who have been sexually assaulted, assigned or sold to ISIS fighters,” Villumsen said.
He is backed by the Social Democrat MP Lars Aslan Rasmussen.
“The Danish government should do everything it can to help find these girls,” Rasmussen said, proposing that Denmark send police officers and other specialists to the Middle East to help with the investigation.
The chairman of the Yezidi Culture Association in Denmark, Yilmaz Yildiz, said that many of the Yezidis in his country – who number some 500 in Denmark – have relatives abducted by ISIS. He was delighted by the statements from the MPs.
"We are really pleased with the statements from the Danish politicians. It is an important moral support for us,” he said.
Rashida Manjoo, the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women, said in August that many of the teenagers kidnapped by ISIS “have been sexually assaulted, and women have been assigned or sold to fighters as ‘malak yamiin’ or slaves.”
In November another 21 Yezidis, most of them women and children, managed to escape captivity under the cover of airstrikes against ISIS near Mosul.
Lykketoft, the fist Dane every to head the UN General Assembly, will take over in September from Uganda’s Sam Kutesa.
