On August 3, 2016, I accompanied some displaced Yezidi victims of the Islamic State (ISIS) terror group back to the ruins of their city, Sinjar, where they demonstrated against their continued destitution and displacement. It was the first time they saw the devastation of the city firsthand since ISIS sacked it and began subjecting its people to a campaign of genocide two years prior. Asked by a local news organization about the significance of the demonstration, I noted that in one way it was progress and a small step forward for the tyrannized minority. After all, it was the first time they could commemorate the genocide in Sinjar itself since the city had only been fully recaptured by the Kurdish Peshmerga forces from ISIS in November 2015.
On August 3, 2017, the residents of Bajed Kandala 2 camp, who are all Yezidis, near the Syrian border in Iraqi Kurdistan once again returned to Sinjar to hold a demonstration. This past August 3, however, they were unable to do so following hostilities between Iraq and the autonomous Kurdish region last fall.
The Yezidi Sinjar region was formerly under the control of Iraqi Kurdistan, whose autonomous government is in Erbil. However, following Kurdistan’s independence referendum last September, the central government in Baghdad sought to reprimand the Kurds and seized most of the territories that are constitutionally disputed between them, Kirkuk being the prime example. Sinjar was one such territory the Peshmerga had to evacuate. As a consequence of Baghdad imposing its control over that region, the Yezidis were unable to return to hold what otherwise would have been their third annual demonstration, a clear setback.
The recapture of the Iraqi city of Mosul, the largest urban center ISIS ever captured, in July 2017 hasn’t substantially improved the humanitarian situation for Yezidis. While some have returned to the ruins of Sinjar no reconstruction has commenced and no comprehensive plan or project to resettle the Yezidis on their homeland has yet been drawn up.
Earlier this August rumours that Iraqi Shiite paramilitaries, who are under Iraqi government command, were withdrawing from Nineveh province, where Sinjar is situated, worried some in the Yezidi community. While relations between some armed Yezidi groups and these paramilitaries have been tense since Baghdad took over Sinjar last October the Yezidis nevertheless feared that a withdrawal of these paramilitaries without a follow-up deployment of Iraqi Army or Peshmerga forces could create a vacuum that ISIS could exploit to subject them to another genocide. Ultimately the paramilitaries are merely reorganizing their forces rather than withdrawing. Nevertheless the fears such rumours sparked demonstrated how vulnerable the Yezidis still feel four years later, despite the ostensible defeat of ISIS in Iraq.
That wasn’t the only thing that spread fear throughout the Yezidi community this August. On August 15th Ismail Özden a member of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), who was ethnically Yezidi and commonly known as Zaki Shingali, was killed in a Turkish airstrike in the Sinjar region. Shingali was returning from the town of Kocho, where he was attending a commemorative memorial to a massacre ISIS carried out in that town exactly four years before, when the Turkish aircraft destroyed his convoy.
Turkey, along with the United States and the European Union, has designated the PKK a terrorist organization and has fought it since 1984. Shingali was one of Turkey’s most-wanted PKK members. The PKK were, nevertheless, instrumental in helping defend the Yezidis in Sinjar from ISIS. The group rescued thousands of Yezidis who were infamously trapped on Mount Sinjar amid the ISIS assault. If it weren’t for these efforts thousands, if not tens-of-thousands, more Yezidis would likely have been massacred and subjected to unmentionable abuse in August 2014.
Yezidis were subsequently dismayed by the assassination of Shingali, since he helped those critical efforts that saved so many of them.
Yezidis in Iraqi Kurdistan live in what were supposed to have been temporary tents, provided by the U.N. and other international agencies, of the kind that can be readily set up in the case of large displacements caused by war or large-scale natural disasters. Such dwellings are not designed to be permanent and are even dangerously flammable. The climate of Kurdistan is excruciatingly hot in summer and the Yezidis have no access to air conditioning, or in some severe cases even a steady supply of water, and suffer in the unrelenting heat as a result. Winter is not much better since it can become extremely cold, when Yezidis have to risk using stoves in their flammable tents to stay warm, and some camps have even been flooded in heavy rain.
Furthermore, under Iraqi control the health system in Sinjar has gotten worse. Impoverished Yezidis who previously had to pay 500 Iraqi Dinars (IQD) under Kurdish administration, less than $0.50USD, for a simple, yet essential, medical check-up now have to pay 3,000IQD, just over $2USD. While a relatively small amount it is enough of a difference to make it inaccessible to many. This isn’t the only problem, under the Iraqi system many Yezidi women have been checked into hospitals in Mosul and consequently suffered traumatizing flashbacks from their time in captivity there. Also, the recapture of most of the territory formerly under ISIS’s so-called caliphate has not revealed the fate of more than 3,000 Yezidis who disappeared four years now.
In light of this grim reality it’s clear that almost half-a-decade after Yezidis were subjected to one of the greatest crimes against humanity of this century their lot has not improved and it will still take some time before they can begin to recover.
Photo: Kurdishstruggle/Creative Commons