A/HRC/30/48 connected trapped inside. In most instances, armed actors remain able to function. It is the civilian population who suffers. H. Religious and ethnic communities 109. All of the Syrian Arab Republic’s religious and ethnic communities are suffering as a result of the conflict. 110. Some communities have been specifically targeted, with discriminatory intent, on the grounds of their actual or perceived religious and/or ethnic background, by ISIS and Jabhat Al-Nusra. In some attacks, anti-Government armed groups have acted in concert with Jabhat Al-Nusra. 111. In other instances, the motivations for attacks are more complex, resulting from perpetrators conflating a community’s ethnic and/or religious backgrounds and its perceived political loyalties. Where ethnic or religious groups are believed to be supporters of an opposing warring faction, the entire community has been the subject of discrimination and, in some instances, violent attack. 112. The geographic spread of the war – where the war is being most intensely fought – has, inevitably, impacted some communities more than others. 113. ISIS’s stated ideology, particularly its posturing as an expansionist caliphate implementing its brand of radical Islam, has motivated its targeting of religious communities it regards as infidels. Nowhere has this been more apparent than in the crimes ISIS perpetrated against thousands of Yazidi taken from Sinjar. 114. Hundreds of Yazidi women abducted during the ISIS August 2014 attack on the Sinjar region of northern Iraq were forced over the border into the Syrian Arab Republic. One of the earliest ISIS convoys of women and children crossed on 17 August 2014. The majority were taken to Raqqah governorate, though some were moved into Dayr Az-Zawr and Aleppo governorates. More convoys followed. 115. Yazidi women were specifically targeted because of their community’s religious identity, which ISIS believes to be pagan. ISIS has subjected Yazidi women and children to horrific abuse. Women and girls have been sold or gifted (and resold and regifted) to ISIS fighters and tribal leaders in ISIS-controlled Syrian Arab Republic. Others are imprisoned in houses in towns and villages across the Syrian Arab Republic, where they are held in sexual slavery. One young woman described ISIS fighters arriving late at night and surveying the girls as though they were “in a sheep market”. Without exception, all interviewees described multiple rapes by several men, including incidents of gang rape. 116. Significant numbers of victims have been girls under 18. For example, the gifting and subsequent rape of a 9-year-old Yazidi girl in Tabqa (Raqqah) was reported. Several Yazidi women and girls have committed suicide during their captivity. 117. Yazidi women and girls have also suffered severe beatings by their ISIS captors. Some were forced to convert to Sunni Islam, though it does not appear that conversion prevented further sexual and physical abuse. 118. The violations committed against Yazidi and other boys in ISIS-controlled Syrian Arab Republic, are detailed in Section D above. 119. In mid-February, ISIS fighters entered Assyrian Christian villages, including Tel Hermes, along the Khabour River in Hasakah. They forced villagers to remove all Christian imagery from their churches, homes and cemeteries. Fighters threatened to impose jiza – a tax imposed on non-Muslims living in an Islamic caliphate – and to kill the local priest if residents did not comply. 15