Near the Iraqi town of Tal Afar, the excavation of one of the mass graves left by ISIS has begun. The 25-meter deep crater of Alu Antar may hold as many as 1,500 bodies. Mostly Yazidis, but also Turkmen Shiites whom ISIS executed here.
Nearly ten years after the Islamic terror group captured Iraq’s second city, Mosul, and conquered a third of the country, thousands of people are still missing. The group often executed its victims at the edge of cliffs or dry ditches that were easy to fill in. Or, as in Tikrit, on the banks of the Tigris, where the river carried away the bodies.
So far, about a hundred mass graves with Yazidi victims have been found, but not all of them have been excavated. This now has priority because the UN organization Unitad, established to prosecute ISIS perpetrators, stops its work in Iraq in September. The Iraqi government no longer considers the NGO’s work necessary. ISIS perpetrators are being prosecuted under Iraq’s anti-terrorism laws, which do not require evidence of crimes against humanity.
For Yazidis, however, the data collected by Unitad is of great importance. Even the excavation of Alu Antar raises questions about the perpetrators. It is likely that the hundreds of men ISIS kidnapped from Sinjar in August 2014 and later imprisoned in the village of Kasr al-Mihrab outside Tal Afar were shot dead here. Who devised this, and who carried it out?
Turning Point
In Erbil, I recently spoke with Soud Msto Najm, the Director-General of Yazidi Affairs of the Kurdish government, about Unitad’s cessation of work. ‘This is a blow to us,’ he said, ‘a turning point in the documentation of Daesh’s crimes and their prosecution.’
Without the evidence collected by Unitad, it will be more difficult to prosecute ISIS perpetrators for what they did to the Yazidis. ‘If the perpetrators are not prosecuted, we will expect another catastrophe in the future. We are not safe in Iraq.’
Over the past centuries, Yazidis have been victims of catastrophes – deadly attacks and genocides aimed at the people because of their beliefs and traditions – 75 times in total. The latest, by ISIS, has been recognized as genocide in many countries, but not in Iraq.
The documentation collected by Unitad in recent years also benefits cases against ISIS members abroad, but that is insufficient. If you do not convict ISIS perpetrators in your own country for their part in the genocide, it risks becoming a minor detail in the group’s atrocities. And no one will be held accountable for planning and executing such crimes.
Identity
Moreover, quite a few ISIS perpetrators have managed to escape and assume a new identity abroad. They do the same with the Yazidi women they still hold. This makes it harder to track down perpetrators and still find Yazidi victims.
Yazidi activist and pharmacist Falah Isa believes Unitad has stumbled upon sensitive information, which led to the withdrawal of Iraqi cooperation. It is likely about money, he tells me in his home in Kurdish Baadre. That could very well be: there are certainly Iraqis who secretly did business with ISIS while their state was at war with the group.
For example, cement giant Lafarge has already been convicted because of paying millions to ISIS, and there is a pending class action from American Yazidis against the Syrian branch that helped ISIS with concrete for building tunnels and bunkers where the group held its hostages. Telecom giant Ericsson also did business with ISIS, paying to operate in occupied territory.
Not Safe
Falah Isa confesses that he does not feel safe in Iraq. A direct cause was an incident last year when the Iraqi government allowed some Sunni families to visit a mosque in Sinjar. This led to a local Yazidi woman recognizing one of her ISIS rapists among the group. She raised the alarm, and the man was arrested.
However, social media spread the story that Yazidis had attacked the mosque in Sinjar, with photos of a mosque in Babylon (which ISIS burned down in 2015). Imams capitalized on this, cursing Yazidis as infidels. ‘They threatened to burn down Lalesh,’ Isa recalls, ‘we were really scared.’
Lalesh is the most important temple of the Yazidis, located in the Kurdistan Region. There were also reports of a possible attack on a Yazidi camp near Kurdish Zakho. ‘The entire Yazidi community was terrified. What happened was so dangerous. I couldn’t sleep.’ At the time, he lived in the mixed city of Sheikhan. There, he saw every Sunni neighbor as a potential attacker. ‘I came to Baadre,’ where only Yazidis live. A year later, he still lives there.
The Kurdish government worked with moderate imams and made videos to show that nothing had happened, no mosque had been burned down, and that there should be tolerance towards Yazidis as one of Iraq’s population groups. Slowly, the threat diminished.
Good Muslims
‘We used to live with good Muslims,’ Isa recalls from 2014. The province of Sinjar was mixed, and there were good relations and friendships between Yazidis and Muslims. ‘But when Daesh came, Muslims were afraid they would also be killed if they did not do what Daesh did.’ One of the traumas of what happened in Sinjar was that Yazidis often faced their own Muslim neighbors.
Sunnis are aware that a chapter still needs to be closed, I heard during my recent travels in the Iraqi Sunni province of Anbar. The danger of radicalism resurgence remains high; just look at the increased activities of ISIS in recent months.
A reconciliation commission, like the one South Africa had after apartheid, could help Iraq out of this spiral, was a suggestion I heard in Anbar.
Naming the atrocities, holding the perpetrators accountable, and then granting forgiveness. Yazidis believe their country has the right to such a process; that they have the right to it too – even if forgiveness might still be a bridge too far. Because they no longer want to feel like second-class citizens forgotten by Baghdad. But especially because they want to feel safe in their own country.
