Plight of Yazidi survivors continues, their voices unheard

The absolute aim of the Islamic State (ISIS) was not only to control land and spread terror, but to eradicate the Yazidi minority for the benefit of the caliphate they were consolidating. 

The 2014 ruthless genocidal campaign to eliminate the Yazidi culture by a system of sexual slavery in which women were routinely and persistently traded, with their bodies assaulted and violated in the most brutal ways. 

The highest religious authority of the Yazidis, Khurto Hajji Ismael, known otherwise as Baba Sheikh, responded to ISIS’ brutal acts against the community and made an unprecedented call for family re-unification on February 6, 2015, stating that all Yazidis who were coerced into ISIS, both men and women, remain untarnished and should be welcomed back into the community after they were rescued from the hands of the terror group. 

ISIS controlled swathes of Iraq and Syria in 2014 but it was territorially defeated in 2017 and 2019 respectively. However, that did not put an end to the dilemma of Yazidis. 

While Yazidi survivors live in internally displaced persons (IDPs) camps that lack basic day-to-day needs, many ISIS affiliates and suspects live comfortably in Europe and elsewhere around the world.

The survivors of ISIS captivity, Yazidi activists, and individuals have done a lot of work for the community. However, a lot more needs to be done to find those who remain missing. 

In April 2019, the Yazidi Supreme Spiritual Council issued a more important though short-lived decree saying the community would accept children born to mothers who were raped by ISIS militants, clearing the way for hundreds of women to return home. 

Theologically, Yazidism is an endogamous faith that requires its members to marry from within their own community but the decree issued by Yazidi Supreme Spiritual Council was based on humanitarian grounds.

However, under pressure from Yazidi traditionalists and political groups, the decree was retracted three days later – women survivors and children kidnapped by the militant group were welcomed back to the community, but there was no place for the children whose father was an ISIS member.

This presented women intended to return home with a stark choice: abandon their children or remain in an everlasting exile. By all accounts, the Yazidi genocide is continuing.

Statistics on the number of abductees and returnees are held by the Office of Kidnapped Yazidis in Duhok, yet without knowing the exact number of Yazidis killed by ISIS, it is impossible to know the exact number of those still missing.

Many of the missing, particularly men and older boys, are assumed to be dead. Others, mostly women, are still held captive in Syria. Hundreds are believed to be kept inside the al-Hol camp run by the Kurdish- led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).

But the question that poses itself is why do Yazidi girls and women refuse to reveal their identity and prefer this new medieval type of life to the prospect of starting a new one in a different country? There are two basic reasons for that: 

The first is that most of the girls were abducted when they were around four to five years old and were subjected to ISIS indoctrination over the past seven years. Coercively dislocated, many of them have forgotten that they are Yazidis.

ISIS turned children against their culture, pulling them away from their families and relatives. They have been significantly impacted by the militant group and are brainwashed as they have spent their early and crucial years of life under the so-called caliphate.

With the specific intent of erasing Yazidis, ISIS fighters moved captivated Yazidis as far away as possible from their homelands to different parts across Iraq and Syria. They took them to areas where ISIS ideologists and Sharia law jurists gave lectures about how Yazidis were “infidels” and that they would not be accepted into the community if they return.

The profound psychological impact of seven years of captivity and the loss of family members is sensed in the community. A growing suicide rate is one sign of how difficult the returnees are finding it to reintegrate.

Mothers are not willing to abandon their children as they are well aware of the taboos engulfing the community that rejects marriage to non-Yazidis. Rape and impregnation by non-Yazidis is seen as a harsh hit to the Yazidi bloodline. 

The public and ferocious stoning to death in 2007 of Du'a Khalil Aswad is evocative. Khalil had eloped with a Muslim and instinctively converted to Islam.

Mother-child segregation is a huge stumbling stone in the way of full re-integration of Yazidis. Mothers were falsely told that they would be allowed to visit their beloved ones, but they never dared to talk about them.

There are some exceptional cases of abandonment where mothers left their children behind as they viewed them as an unbearable reminder of being brutalized and raped by ISIS members. However, the vast majority do not want to leave their flesh behind.

The commodification of Yazidi women and girls left scars on individuals and the community alike. Some women and girls were sold and re-sold individually or collectively. Such dehumanizing acts were perpetrated strategically to destroy the individual and tear apart the group. 

Physically and emotionally scarred by long years of abuse they seem unable to undergo new transformation. Psychologically, these women are destroyed, while culturally they are rejected.

The Iraqi Parliament, after prolonged debate, passed in March 2021 a law, legally recognizing ISIS crimes against Yazidis as genocide and mandating, among others, a decent life for female survivors.

Seemingly ground-breaking, the pompous law was too narrow to address the needs of the people in question, notably the fate of the children born to ISIS fighters. 

Strikingly, in the very same month, nine Yazidi mothers were reportedly reunited with their twelve babies who were in an orphanage inside Syria. The secret operation was carried out at the Syrian Iraqi Faishkhabur-Semalka border crossing. 

It seems, though strange, that after long years of family loss and dismemberment, many Yazidi girls and women now feel the comfort and protection of the new culture they unwillingly entered and they do not wish to leave.

Lazghine Ya'qoube is a translator and researcher focusing on the modern history of Mesopotamia, with a special focus on Yazidi and Assyrian affairs in Turkey, Syria and Iraq.

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