The month of August marks the commemoration of the incursion of the terrorist group ISIS into the Sinjar province of Iraq, with all the atrocities that followed. It all began nine years ago on the night of August 3rd, after Kurdish forces fled from the advancing ISIS fighters. Thousands of members of the Yezidi minority were killed, thousands of women and children were abducted, and around 2,500 of these are still missing.
What I primarily recall from the initial weeks after the invasion of Sinjar is sheer disbelief. Both from myself and from many around me, concerning the atrocities that ISIS was committing. The beheadings. Neighbors turning against the Yezidis. The murder of mothers and grandmothers, women deemed too old to serve as sex slaves. The very concept of sex slaves and slave markets. Could this really be happening in our time?
When the first Yezidi women managed to escape, it quickly became clear that all of it was true. There was no exaggeration in the stories that had emerged in those initial days. Later, I heard about the desperate fight in the two villages first reached by ISIS, where Yezidis, critically short of weapons and ammunition, managed to hold off the terrorist group for hours. Hardly any of those brave men survived. I know a young woman who managed to escape from there but witnessed such horror that she underwent years of treatment to prevent her from repeatedly fainting due to her trauma.
Mountain
And then there were the many thousands who, in complete panic and often pursued by ISIS fighters, fled up Mount Sinjar. Without water, in the August heat. A helicopter that crashed while delivering aid and evacuating stranded Yezidis resulted in the death of the pilot. Acquaintances of mine, including a photographer, a politician, and an activist, were injured.
Ten days later, I witnessed thousands of Yezidis, finally rescued from the mountain, arriving in the Yezidi village of Sharia in the Kurdistan Region. They came in open trucks, coming from Syria where the Kurdish resistance group PKK had managed to secure a corridor to the mountain. They were utterly disoriented and traumatized by their experiences. Children were hoarding the small cartons of juice that were offered, recalling the thirst of the past days. The emptiness in their eyes made sense later, when I learned about children and elderly who had died of thirst on the mountain.
In all places where people couldn’t escape in time, the men and older women were murdered, and the women and children were loaded into trucks. The last to experience this were in the town of Kocho. Due to good relations with Sunni neighboring villages, its residents held out for two weeks. But as they consistently refused to convert to Islam, men and women were ultimately separated, and murdered or taken away.
Trauma
I interviewed women who became sex slaves but managed to escape, children who were inducted into ‘training’ to become suicide bombers. Men who set up escape networks to get them out of the Caliphate. Families who paid many thousands of dollars to ISIS to get their mothers and sisters back. Many stories were horrific, especially those about repeated resales and rapes. Trauma care could never be enough.
I wrote about it; books, articles, essays, all to tell the world about what was happening. ISIS kept losing ground and was eventually defeated in Syria in 2019. However, many Yezidi women and children are still missing. They are hidden among radical ISIS families in the Al-Hol camp in Syria. Family members who have continued searching find them also among escaped ISIS families living in Turkey and elsewhere in Syria.
It became clear early on that ISIS also sold the women to extremists in other Muslim countries. I spoke to a young woman who escaped just before she was to be sold to Saudi Arabia. There are undoubtedly other Yezidi women still trapped there.
Recently, a young Yezidi girl made the news after ending up in Palestine, in the town of Nablus. At ten, she was forced into marriage – which, with ISIS, often simply meant there was a contract of ownership. She has three children from two marriages and, after the fall of ISIS, was smuggled with her children from Syria via Turkey and Egypt to Palestine. Her last husband, a Palestinian, died in Syria.
Children
She has since left her in-laws who had brought her over. Yet she doesn’t want to return to Iraq, as she would then be separated from her children. For this is the next problem these already beleaguered Yezidi women face. Under Iraqi law, due to the father’s faith, their children are considered to be Muslims. And the spiritual leaders of the Yezidis refuse to recognize them because marrying outside the faith is prohibited.
I was shocked to look at this young woman. Her niqab can’t hide how young she still is. She speaks in Arabic with the Kurdish network Rudaw. Like many Yezidi women abducted as children, she has forgotten Kurdish. But she is clearly also intelligent and aspires to become a doctor. What is her future, far away from her family (who, it seems, mostly survived ISIS and with whom she is in contact) and her community? Such ties are especially important for members of a religious minority like the Yezidis.
There’s an NGO in Kurdistan that helps women like her, but due to the sensitivities, it keeps a low profile. But even so, reunion with her family in Iraq seems unlikely. Yezidi women who wish to keep their children fathered by ISIS men typically relocate to Europe, where the community is more liberal.
Consequences
Nine years after ISIS, there are still so many visible consequences. Before 2014, there were about 550,000 Yezidis Iraq. Now, over 135,000 still live in refugee camps in the Kurdish Region, and almost 190,000 elsewhere in Iraq, mostly in Kurdistan and the Nineveh province. Because the government does little to facilitate a return to Sinjar, around 120,000 Yezidis have left the country. There’s still no certainty about the death toll and the victims: still in many mass graves the bodies have not been exhumed.
Recently, Great Britain joined the countries (including the Netherlands and Germany) that officially label what ISIS did to the Yezidis as genocide. As a result, perpetrators can be prosecuted. However, Baghdad has remained silent. ISIS members are tried there for terrorism; the fact that there was a genocide is still not recognized in Iraq.
This amplifies the Yezidis’ mistrust in the state, which initially failed to prevent ISIS from occupying their province and either killing or enslaving them. And after driving out ISIS, it did nothing to prevent their province from becoming a pawn of both militias and politicians. For Iraqi politicians and administrators see the ISIS occupation (between 2014 and 2017) of a third of their country primarily as a violation of the state, as an act of terror, and not as a genocide against a minority group among the Iraqi citizens.
Recognition
Nine years after ISIS tried to exterminate the Yezidis because of their culture and beliefs, many Iraqis still look at them in the same way: as infidels, devil-worshipers, dirty and backward. Hate speech is common on social media. The fact that Yezidi youth have excelled at Kurdish universities in recent years and were among the very best makes no difference. Politicians pay them lip service at commemorations, but real help is hardly on offer.
Nine years have passed. The Yezidis are waiting for recognition of what was done to them. For apologies from imams and Iraqis who allowed it to happen. For reparations (which are only trickling in), trauma treatments, and support so they can return home. For measures against radical imams who adhere to the ISIS discourse.
But Iraq has already retreated into a mode of denial. It wasn’t the fault of the Iraqis, but of the radical lunatics of ISIS. And after all, they have been prosecuted. The Yezidis will have to make do with that. History shows: Victims in Iraq always come last.
