Priest says ISIS has become an efficient "killing machine"
ISIS has become an efficient "killing machine" run in a scientific way much like Hitler ran his Holocaust against the Jews, says a priest who would know. Fr. Patrick Desbois has been uncovering hidden sites of the Holocaust for years and points out the similarities he finds in the ethnic cleansing ISIS has undertaken against the Yezidis in Iraqi Kurdistan. Lara Logan and 60 MINUTES cameras accompany the French Catholic priest on a recent mission to expose a genocide that has taken the lives of at least 5,000 Yezidis. Logan's story will be broadcast on the next edition of 60 Minutes on Sunday, May 8 at 7 p.m. ET/PT.
Fr. Desbois has been studying the methods the Nazis used to organize the slaughter of Jews and others in WWII for 15 years on his mission to uncover hidden holocaust graves. Logan joined him in the Iraqi town of Sinjar, after it was re-taken Peshmerga fighters backed by U.S airstrikes. What ISIS did in Sinjar to the Yezidi residents, who once numbered in the tens of thousands there, was frighteningly familiar.
He points to a prominent building in the destroyed town where the remnants of Yezidi identification papers were found. "That is the beginning of genocide...they say to people, 'Don't worry, we'll bring you to a nice building.' It's why they accept. And here begins the selection. And so this system is system of permanent, permanent selection," Fr. Desbois tells Logan.
"They see a boy who is ten years old, he can carry a bomb, he will carry bombs. They see a girl, she's beautiful. Oh, she will be sold to an Emir to be a sex slave. They have the sense of utility. A person is only to be used for something," says Fr. Desbois. It's estimated that thousands of Yezidis were taken from Sinjar, while approximately 5,000 were killed by ISIS fighters. The small city was a cradle of Yezidi culture for about a thousand years; much of it is rubble after the fighting.
Logan and Desbois see mass graves in Sinjar and go to a refugee camp to get eyewitness accounts from the Yezidis who managed to escape the town or their captors. They speak to a woman who was held as a sex slave before escaping.
"It's not easy to manage a war, to manage international terrorism and to manage a genocide in same territory," Fr. Desbois tells Logan. "Hitler, it took for him a long time before doing all that. And ISIS, they did it so quickly...it's frightening because it means actually there is a kind of science of terrorist, war and genocide. They developed a science."