Yazidis after ISIS: Repair and Recovery from Genocide
2018 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Nadia Murad, an Iraqi Yazidi, is one of the foremost activists of Yazidi rehabilitation. Behind her from top to bottom are a map of approximate Yazidi territory, a Yazidi refugee camp, and a mass grave. (Wikimedia Commons, Flickr, Flickr, Picryl, modified by Michael Skora)
“We try to trick ourselves into thinking that this didn’t really happen to be able to go on with life,” Ms. Murad said at an interview following the funeral on February 4 of 103 victims of Islamic State’s (ISIS) genocide against the Yazidi, an Indigenous group from the Kurdish regions of northern Iraq. The burial process came two years after the bodies’ DNA was confirmed by Iraqi and international experts. Relatives and community members mourned their lost ones in a funeral that lasted the entire day.
In a statement commemorating the event published by Yazda, a United States-based nonprofit organization founded following the outbreak of the Yazidi Genocide, legal representative Amal Clooney acknowledged the emotional and spiritual closure the event served for the victim’s families but also sharply criticized the international community’s inaction in prosecuting ISIS for genocide in an international trial.
Although ISIS ceased to control territory in 2019, six-and-a-half years after ISIS militants originally invaded Yazidi villages in the Sinjar region of northern Iraq, Yadizis still struggle with the neglected, unsanitary conditions of refugee camps as well the traumatic memories of kidnappings, torture, and sexual slavery. This physical trauma is invoked by the deaths of thousands from ISIS-perpetrated massacres. According to one estimate by PLOS Medicine, within a few days in August 2014, ISIS killed an estimated 3,100 Yazidi and kidnapped an additional 6,800, a combined total of around 2.5 percent of the Yazidi population in Sinjar. As of August 2020, only 3,542 kidnapped Yazidis have been recovered. As Ms. Murad wrote in her 2019 Washington Post opinion piece, “genocide is a process, not an event. The continued suffering, fear, and uncertainty in the Yazidi community show that the genocide process is ongoing.”
Faith and Persecution: A Very Brief History of the Yazidis
Yazidi is often described as an ethnoreligious group, one in which, similar to many other minority groups in the surrounding region, followers can only be born into membership. Although the origins and early history of the group can be difficult to uncover due to the predominantly oral religious practices of Yazidism up until recently, the group has a rich history of syncretism and traditional development with other faiths and cultures. This is done especially between Sufism, a mystical branch of Islam, and the various pre-existing religions in upper Mesopotamia such as Zoroastrianism and Mithraism.
Each of these active cultural exchanges coalesced into a more familiar form of Yazidism when the Sufi Sheikh ‘Adi ibn Musafir arrived in Kurdish Mesopotamia and persuaded numerous inhabitants to follow him and his mystical teachings. Over the next century, following Sheikh ‘Adi’s death in 1162 CE in Lalish, where his tomb is now a site of Yazidi pilgrimage, Yazidism spread from the writings of his grandson’s nephew, Sheik Hasan, and through Saladin’s soldiers and Ayyubid Sultanate ambassadors. Until the 15th century CE, Yazidism continued to deviate from Islam, most prominently through the theological disagreement over Tawusî Melek, the Yazidi Peacock Angel.
In the Yazidi account, the Peacock Angel defies God, similar to Shaytan, the Muslim conception of Satan. However, unlike in Shaytan’s story, God praises the Peacock Angel’s defiance and rewards him with the status of humanity’s link with God. Subsequently, the Yazidis are disparaged as “devil worshipers” by states from the Ottoman Empire to ISIS. These differences are the root of much anti-Yazidi persecution.
Yazidi status as a cultural minority historically left them vulnerable to a series of oppression. For example, during the 1970s, Saddam Hussain, in a genocidal attempt to assimilate the Kurdish peoples into the majority-Arab Iraq, forcibly uprooted and resettled Yazidis into urban centers. Persecution is so embedded in Yazidi history that they consider the most recent patch of violence by ISIS as the 74th genocide committed against them.
The Siege and Corridor at Sinjar
For over half a decade, ISIS oppressed various minorities and demographics within its conquered territory, which at its zenith in Fall 2014 contained a quarter of Iraq and Syria’s combined population and over a third of their combined area. Targeted groups included Assyrian, Chaldean, and Syriac Christians, and Turkmen and Shabak Muslims. However, the United Nations only designated persecution against the Yazidis as genocide. Importantly, the Security Council Report of that designation stressed that mass killings were not the primary route of genocide for ISIS. Rather, “the infliction of conditions of life” such as forcible conversions, gendered and child separations, and inhuman treatment purposefully and destructively erased the cultural identity of the Yazidis.
On August 3, 2014, ISIS first invaded Sinjar as part of their broader campaign to expand northern Iraq territory. Within the next few days, tens of thousands of Yazidis fled to the Sinjar Mountains, which trapped them without safe and secure access to food and water while under siege by ISIS. Almost immediately, reports of massacres and enslavement against the Yazidis emerged, placing pressure on the international community to respond; however, decisive military action failed to materialize until more than a week later. In the meantime, Yazidis faced a brutal and arduous journey fleeing from the mountains, often hampered by ISIS militants blocking essential routes and passages.
Finally, on August 14, the People’s Protection Units (YPG), a Kurdish militia created during the Syrian Civil War, and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a leftist guerilla group originating from Turkey, formed a corridor from the Sinjar Mountains as protection for displaced Yazidis to escape. Assisted by United States airstrikes and Iraqi Kurd armed forces, the YPG and PKK rescued as much as 75 percent of the Sinjar District. Several Yazidis fled the mountains by tractor or foot within the cleared areas from the YPG and PKK.
The Aftermath of Atrocity
After 15 months of fighting, Kurdish and Yazidi forces pushed ISIS out of the Sinjar region in 2015. Unfortunately, more than a year of strenuous ground campaigning and U.S. airstrikes had reduced much of Sinjar’s homes and structures to rubble.
Although around 120,000 Yazidis had returned to their homeland by August 2020, nearly 200,000 Yazidi still remain in Kurdistan refugee camps. Many accounts record trauma among these surviving populations. Several survivors personally witnessed and experienced crimes such as the execution of relatives or abuse as a sex slave. Numerous studies additionally confirm the prevalence of PTSD and depression among Yazidi refugees, especially for women enslaved under ISIS rule.
Nadia Murad, perhaps the most prominent activist for Yazidi women, shared a Nobel Peace Prize with Congolese activist Dr. Denis Mukwege “for their efforts to end the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war and armed conflict."
Now, six years after the original invasion by ISIS, the Yazidi community still struggles with reconciliation, especially in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Although no cases have been recorded in the area, nationwide restrictions shut down much of the commercial and social activity within the Sinjar region, further increasing stress for a vulnerable population.
Doctors Without Borders mental health manager Phoebe Yonkeu in Sinuni reported a subsequent increase in domestic violence as well as general depressive and aggressive behavior in the population. Additionally, Yazidi patients at the nearby Dohuk hospital were also re-routed to Mosul four-hours away where most Kurmanji-speaking Yazidis would be at odds with the mostly Arabic-speaking city.
High suicide rates have also sparked alarm for the Yazidi community and international proponents. Within the first 10 days of 2021, 11 Yazidis committed suicide, as did 250 Yazidis in 2020. Dr. Jan Ilhan Kizilhan, who helped 1,100 Yazidis, including Ms. Murad, receive psychological counseling, demanded that Iraq immediately address the mental health crisis. Other supportive NGOs include Yazda, the Coalition for Just Reparation, and Nadia’s Initiative, which Ms. Murad founded.
Several nonprofit organizations now must face the challenge of revigorating community and individual health following the atrocity of the destabilizing effects of the pandemic. For example, under the project, ‘Immediate Livelihoods Support for Recovery and Resilience Building,’ Islamic Reliefs connects returning Yazidis to Sinjar with agriculture and business training to foster employment and economic recovery. Meanwhile, Nadia’s Initiative emphasizes a “bottom-up” approach in order to center the concerns and trauma of Yazidi women and girls as concerns of the overall Yazidi community.
Ms. Murad is particularly concerned that broader efforts against COVID-19 have overshadowed the struggles of post-conflict communities; a “bottoms-up” approach would be much more suitable for fulfilling the needs of the Yazidi and other persecuted communities.
As precarious as the world is in general during the ongoing pandemic, COVID-19 especially compounds the harm directed towards communities and people already in crisis.