A displaced Yezidi man in Shariya IDP camp in Iraq. 2015. —Mackenzie Knowles-Coursin for US Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Ten years ago, on August 3, 2014, fighters from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) attacked the Sinjar region of northern Iraq. In pick-up trucks flying the pseudo-state's infamous black and white flags, hundreds of heavily armed, black-clad men sped northwards from Baaj, a village just beyond the southern reach of Sinjar.
No one, neither the fighters nor the communities living in the Sinjar region, was under any illusion as to the intended target of the assault. Since ISIL's taking of Mosul in June 2014, northern Iraq's mosaic of ethno-religious minorities had kept close watch on ISIL’s attacks on the Shia Turkmen of Tel Afar, and on the Christians and Shabak of Mosul and the Nineveh plains. Sinjar, with its mixed population, was home to the majority of the world’s Yezidis, a distinct religious community whose beliefs and practice span hundreds, if not thousands, of years. One of Iraq's most marginalized religious groups, the Yezidis had suffered waves of persecutory and annihilative campaigns since at least the 13th century, shortly after they first appeared in the written record. ISIL, weaponizing misconceptions long present in Iraqi society, publicly revile the Yezidis as mushrikūn, polytheists and idol worshippers.
Thousands of Yezidi civilians were captured. Those who eventually returned to their community—who escaped, were rescued, or most often, who were sold back to their families—brought with them accounts of almost unimaginable atrocities: of men, adolescent boys and women past child-bearing age being shot or beheaded; of younger women and girls, some scarcely older than nine, sold at market, beaten, forced to labor, and held in sexual slavery by ISIL fighters; and of young Yezidi boys taken from their mothers, indoctrinated, forced into ISIL training camps, and made to fight. In its targeted attack on the Yezidis of Sinjar, ISIL was driven by the absolute belief that this pre-Islamic community had to be eradicated for the benefit of the society they were building. This understanding was underscored by ISIL's destruction of Yezidi temples and shrines in Sinjar during and after the attack.
In 2015, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Simon-Skjodt Center for Prevention of Genocide determined that ISIL was committing genocide in its ongoing attack on the Yezidis. Months later, in June 2016, the United Nations Human Rights Council also concluded—based on its own independent investigations—that ISIL was committing genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes in its coordinated attack on the Yezidis. In 2021, the United Nations Investigative Team to promote Accountability for the crimes committed by Da’esh/ISIL (UNITAD) also reached a conclusion of genocide following its own extensive in-country investigation, with its findings presented to the UN Security Council as well as to various national prosecutors pursuing charges against members and supporters of ISIL.
This month saw the commemoration of the 10th anniversary of the genocide. Pari Ibrahim, Executive Director of the Free Yezidi Foundation, stated that ten years on, “the Yezidi community—both living in Iraq and the increasing number now in the diaspora—remain deeply frustrated and apprehensive about the lack of concerted efforts to find the thousands still missing, the seemingly diminishing prospects for accountability, and the rise in hate speech and threats of violence against the Yezidi community.”
There has never been an organized effort to locate missing Yezidis, with many still believed to be held in the Al-Hol camp in northern Syria where ISIL-affiliated women and children are detained. Some families report receiving calls from ISIL members demanding ransoms for Yezidi women and children held in private homes in and outside of Iraq. Only 61 of the 94 known mass graves in Sinjar have been exhumed, and of those exhumed, only a few remains have been identified and the bodies reburied under Yezidi religious rites.
The Yezidi community is increasingly angry and despondent with the slow and halting pace of the much-promised justice and accountability, with only a patchwork of cases being brought mainly in Germany and Sweden. Iraq has not yet, and seems unlikely to, pass legislation incorporating international crimes into its domestic law, limiting the possibility of in-country trials for anything other than terrorism offenses. With the imminent closure of UNITAD in September 2024, following the withdrawal of Iraq’s support for its mission, many ISIL survivors, Yezidis included, fear that the path to achieving accountability is narrowing significantly.
Like many persecuted groups, Yezidis have faced, and continue to face, entrenched “othering” that, over centuries, has erupted in waves of persecutory and genocidal campaigns. The attack by ISIL, which commenced ten years ago, should not therefore be seen as an aberration. Anti-Yezidi attitudes are deeply entrenched in Iraqi society; when they burst into view, they are often accompanied with implicit, and sometimes explicit, threats of violence.
In April 2023, following the online spread of false rumors that Yezidis in Sinjar had attacked a mosque, one NGO documented 334,000 incidents of hate speech against Yezidis in a single day, including incitements to violence. Last week, an ill-judged remark by Qassim Shasho, a Yezidi commander, about Prophet Mohammed during a commemoration ceremony in Sinjar, led to a wave of hate speech and online threats of violence. Despite a clarification by Shasho shortly afterwards, the threats and fears of renewed violence led hundreds of Yezidi families, displaced to IDP camps as a result of the August 2014 ISIL attack, to flee from the Kurdistan Region into Sinjar. Iraq, which has yet to prosecute a single member of ISIL for crimes against the Yezidis, has issued an arrest warrant for Shasho.
Ten years on from the genocide, it is not only trauma that remains. Yezidis continue to struggle to receive adequate support to find their missing, bury their dead, and to receive even a half-measure of justice. And while they remain under threat from a resurgent ISIL, the continued threats against not only their safety, but their existence, underscore that—without consistent action to uproot tenacious bigotries—the threat of annihilation often outlasts any one particular perpetrator.
Sareta Ashraph is a legal consultant for the Simon-Skjodt Center.