Number 74: Ten Years Passed, Yazidis Still Await Reconciliation

A decade after facing their 74th massacre in 800 years, many questions persist as to why Yazidis face ongoing atrocities.

by Mark Basta, 2024 Spring Associate

“I beg you, Mr. Speaker, my people are being slaughtered. Today, the Yazidis are being slaughtered… We are being slaughtered, annihilated. An entire religion is being wiped off the face of the Earth. Brothers, I am calling out to you in the name of humanity! In the name of humanity, save us!”

These wailing words were MP Vian Dakhil’s desperate attempt to call on the Iraqi Parliament to the tens of thousands of Yazidis living in northern Iraq from ISIS’s genocidal campaign. On August 3rd, 2014, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), officially known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, attacked Sinjar, home to then 400,000 Yazidis, which used to be the largest Yazidi community worldwide. The next four days carried the most horrendous crimes as ISIS fighters surrounded the villages, exterminated men, and abducted around 6,417 women and children. One decade later, around 2,763 are still missing, more than 175,000 Yazidi refugees still live in internally displaced persons (IDP) camps, and 70% of Sinjar, where most of the atrocities took place, is still under the rubble.

In memorial of those who perished and in solidarity with those who survived, we recount the context and social dynamics leading up to the brutality of these genocidal crimes, which the Yazidis identify as their 74th massacre in the last 800 years. Above all, this reminds us of the salient question: how has this happened when we have sworn “Never Again?”

Yazidis, or Êzidîs, are an endogamous community native to Kurdistan and number around 700,000 to 1 million people worldwide, with the majority living in north Iraq. The non-Abrahamic, ethnoreligious minority follows a monotheistic faith that dates more than 7,00 years back. For centuries, outsiders have volunteered to identify Yazidism based on erroneous assumptions. Numerous Kurdish scholars have simplified Yazidis’ identity as the evolutionary successors of Zoroastrianism, an ancient but more novel than Yazidism, an Iranic religion. Western historians have also repeatedly attempted to define Yazidism as an unoriginal, syncretic belief system that blends surrounding faiths like Christianity, Sufism, Shiism, and Mesopotamian paganism. Most recently, ISIS followed suit by identifying Yazidis as “devil worshippers.” That pattern of falsified, unilateral identification eventually contributed to IS fighters’ justification for the killing and abduction.

Upon seizing Mosul, ISIS advanced towards Sinjar to establish a passage connecting their newly acquired Iraqi stronghold with Raqqa, their Syrian counterpart base. The Peshmerga, the Kurdish militia, and the Yazidis’ only armed defense left Sinjar shortly before the onslaught without warning the local elders as they were aware of ISIS’s superior capabilities. Consequently, over 250,000 Yazidis sought refuge on Mount Sinjar within a span of fewer than 5 hours. With nothing but their clothes and scarce rations, hundreds of Yazidis died of extreme weather conditions and starvation. Among the numerous initial Yazidis confronted, perhaps the most startling was the realization that many of the assailants were their Sunni Arab neighbors, with whom they had peacefully coexisted for years.

Yazidis’ living conditions– combined with the thousands of abductees who are still yet to return home– have barely seen any improvements in the last decade. The Iraqi central government, for instance, has only allocated 39 million dollars for rebuilding Sinjar out of its 459 billion dollar 3-year budget. There have also been very few institutional reforms, especially ones to prevent further genocidal sexual violence. For example, Iraqi laws do not criminalize marital rape and waive the penalties on the perpetrator if he marries the victim. Even worse, Yazidis have received very little support in returning the abductees, so they have to pay ransoms to the kidnappers and privately organize efforts to return their people. All of these factors have contributed to Yazidis’ feeling of insecurity and non-belongness, even amongst their Kurdish neighbors, leading to increased immigration to European countries.

ISIS militants executed thousands of men and abducted over 6,000 women and children to establish their slavery market and employ child soldiers, respectively. It wasn't until August 7 that the United States launched an airstrike targeting active fighters while Syrian Kurdish militia units excavated a passage for Yazidis to escape toward Syria.

The Koch Massacre, one of the genocide’s most atrocious massacres, happened on August 15th, three days after IS fighters had already met with Koch village’s elders, demanding that they convert to Islam or face the wrath of ayat as-sayf. On that day, the militants gathered everyone in the village’s high school after they refused to convert. After separating the men from the younger women and children, fighters shot and beheaded almost all the village’s men– 700– and more than 80 elderly women and buried them in mass graves. The remaining women and children were sent to Mosul and a neighboring Arab village, Tal Afar, to be sold in slave markets. This incident would become the Genocide’s deadliest event and roughly the end to the mass killing, but not the abductions.

Even with all of this evidence, only 18 countries, besides the UN, have officially recognized the atrocities as genocide. With this devastating disappointment to the victims, and with the continued dysfunction of international laws on genocide– the UN Genocide Convention– the UNGC has repeatedly failed to accomplish its goals, which can suggest that codifying the crime of genocide has allowed the perpetrators to commit similar or worse actions that do not match the Convention’s vocabulary. With more than 12 ongoing genocide emergencies globally, the international community has found numerous ways to stall discussions on immediate prevention of all of those threats. These scattered debates and investigations beg the question: was codifying the definition of genocide in international law an effective legal advancement or a jargonic excuse to be used by the perpetrators to get away with their new and ambitious genocidal tactics that outdated the UNGC’s framework?

______________________________________________________________________

References

CNN. (2014, August). ‘A catastrophe’: Yazidi survivor recalls horror of evading ISIS and death. Retrieved from https://www.cnn.com/2014/08/09/world/meast/yazidi-survivor/index.html

Free Yezidi Foundation. (n.d.) Missing Yezidis. Retrieved from https://freeyezidi.org/missing-yezidis/

Global Justice System. (n.d.) Iraqi Law Analysis. Retrieved from https://www.globaljusticecenter.net/

Human Rights Watch. (2023, June). Iraq: Political Infighting Blocking Reconstruction of Sinjar. Retrieved from https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/06/06/iraq-political-infighting-blocking-reconstruction-sinjar

USAID. (2024). Iraq - Complex Energy. Retrieved from https://www.usaid.gov/sites/default/files/2024-01/2024-01-22_USG_Iraq_Complex_Emergency_Fact_Sheet_1.pdf

Save the Children. (n.d.). A Childhood of Fear: The Impact of Genocide on Yazidi Children in Sinjar. Retrieved from https://image.savethechildren.org/a-childhood-of-fear.pdf-ch11044881.pdf/26fw6j2ga3ycx0137a88ato6564d80hl.pdf

United State Institute of Peace. (2021, October). Why Is There No Global Effort to Find the Missing Yazidis?. Retrieved from https://www.usip.org/blog/2021/10/why-there-no-global-effort-find-missing-yazidis