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Home > CNN's Lemon Spotlights Plight of Yazidi Women Enslaved by ISIS

CNN's Lemon Spotlights Plight of Yazidi Women Enslaved by ISIS

By Matthew Balan | November 11, 2014 | 3:29 PM EST
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CNN's Don Lemon refreshingly devoted air time on Monday's CNN Tonight to an ongoing atrocity being committed by Islamic extremist group ISIS – their sexual enslavement of hundreds of Yazidi girls and women. Lemon brought up the radicals' war crime during a segment with CNN terrorism analyst Paul Cruickshank [video available at CNN.com]:

DON LEMON: Let's move on and talk about these – I'm sure you've heard the audio of low-level ISIS fighters talking about slave-trading Yazidi women. It's very disturbing. We'll take a listen; and then, we'll talk about it. (clip of ISIS fighters talking in foreign language)

Even if they're joking – and they're talking about selling girls here – I mean, that's – it's horrible. What's going on here?

PAUL CRUICKSHANK, CNN TERRORISM ANALYST: It's absolutely repugnant. Not clear exactly what's going on in the video – but it's – it's very well documented by now that ISIS captured hundreds of Yazidi girls, and they've provided them to their fighters as – as sex slaves. And they boasted about this in – in online communications – their online magazine, 'Dabiq,' – saying to bring them back to the glorious Islamic days of the past. So, they're quite open that they're doing this – that they're providing their fighters with hundreds of sex slaves-

LEMON: Some of them as young as nine years old. Is that part of – is that a recruiting tool as well? I mean-

CRUICKSHANK: Well, I mean, that's absolutely atrocious, and there's – accounts of young girls as young as 11 being – being raped as well. But they're providing them to the fighters as a recruiting tool to, sort of, motivate them. And some of these young fighters are welcoming these – these  new brides, but obviously abusing them in horrible ways.

On Friday, the MRC's Katie Yoder spotlighted how only a few media outlets have picked up on this glaring example of ISIS's homicidal campaign in Syria and Iraq.

Just over a month earlier, Lemon wondered if "liberals have failed" in addressing "the treatment of women; the treatment of gays...in the Muslim...world," as he discussed Bill Maher and Sam Harris's controversial remarks about Islam on Maher's HBO show.

Foreign Policy
Iraq
Middle East
Syria
War on Terrorism
Religion
Islam
CNN
CNN Tonight
Video
ISIS
Don Lemon

Source URL: http://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/matthew-balan/2014/11/11/cnns-lemon-spotlights-plight-yazidi-women-enslaved-isis