Yazidis demand Iraq actively search for their missing persons

"Islamic State" is fighting its endgame with Yazidis waiting anxiously. Angered by Iraqi government silence following reports that IS killed 50 of their women, they are pushing for real action to find 3,000 of their own.

 

Judit Neurink, Zakho

After more than four and a half years as prisoners of the Islamic terror group "Islamic State," 21 Iraqi Yazidis, most of them children, were recently reunited with their families in the Kurdistan region of Iraq. Only a small number of Yazidis have been able to escape from Baghouz, the final holdout of IS.

Of the more than 6,000 members of the religious minority that IS kidnapped in Iraq in 2014, intending to turn the women into sex slaves and the boys into fighters, some 3,000 women, children and men are still missing. And while the exact number of Yazidis who have got out of Baghouz is not known, it is not more than a few dozen.

One of them is Suaad Daoud, 21, who last month left the Syrian enclave with the IS family she served and has now been reunited with surviving relatives in a Yazidi camp in Kurdistan. Talking in a quiet restaurant near the Iraqi Kurdish border city of Zakho, though distracted at times, she appears to have survived the atrocities she was subjected to relatively well.

She knows that many Yazidi women and children are still with IS families since fleeing Baghouz but not coming forward. "They are scared," she says. When leaving the village, she disobeyed her captors and gave her real Yazidi name to the Syrian Kurdish forces of the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) who received them. "They told us we would be killed if we did," she says.

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In Iraq, minorities pin hopes on a Kurdish state

Iraqi minorities have been voting for an independent Kurdish state in a bid for stability and peace. A Kurdish passport and nationality could improve their situation, they believe. Judit Neurink reports from Irbil, Iraq.

Disappointment with the Iraqi government and loyalty to the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, which took them in when the terror group "Islamic State" deprived them of their homes and livelihoods, has led many Iraqi minorities to support the Kurdish push for independence. When the Kurds voted on Monday on secession from Iraq, they included not only the minorities in their own region, but also those in the lands beyond it which they are claiming for their new state.

"This is now our community," says Inaam Tomea, 45, showing her blue inked finger after voting. She is from the Christian city of Qaraqosh, on the Nineveh Plains, which IS took over in August 2014 and which the Kurdistan Region wants to be part of its future state. Most of its inhabitants fled to Kurdistan and to camps set up in Ainkawa, the Christian enclave of the Kurdish capital, Irbil.

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Iraqi refugees seek family reunion in Germany

The German consulate in Irbil is helping Iraqi refugees overcome bureaucratic obstacles on their way to rejoining family members in Germany. Judit Neurink reports from Irbil.

"I miss him so," Mahdia, 17, says, as tears roll down her face. Her twin brother Mehdi fled to Germany a while ago and she is now with their family in the office of the International Organization for Migration (IOM) in the Iraqi Kurdistan capital of Irbil to prepare the paperwork needed to join him there.

Her father, Abas Khalil Elias, wipes his eyes too. He looks haggard after living in a camp for the past three years, trying to feed his eight remaining children by working on the fields. Before the "Islamic State" (IS) group entered their village of Khanasur in the Yazidi province of Sinjar in August 2014, he was a driver. The Yazidi family fled to the Sinjar mountains where a corridor was created to keep them out of IS' hands. Thousands of other Yazidis were not so lucky; IS captured at least 6,000 women and children and killed thousands of men.

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No pills, but art therapy for trauma victims

With a shortage of therapists in the country, many of the thousands of traumatized victims of war and violence in Iraq are treated with pills that often do not offer a solution for their trauma.

The most well-known cases of trauma are among the many Yezidi victims of ISIS. But as the militant group gets pushed back further, more victims are emerging in towns and villages around Mosul, and from the city itself.

As the number of people needing therapy is rising, it is increasingly important to find ways to educate more therapists. A training of trainers in art therapy program was, therefore, set up in the Kurdistan Region capital Erbil.

“The training teaches trainers to use skills that will be an alternative to the medicine,” said Bahar Ali of the local Emma Foundation, who organized the training. “Art is an easy tool. We can use it in schools and shelters, anywhere in the society.”

She pointed out that “especially now after ISIS, it is a good time to start with this therapy, as we do not have the experts.”
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What’s the future of Iraq with so many traumatized but untreated victims?

The barbarism of the Islamic group ISIS has made many victims. Directly and indirectly it has damaged entire communities and even a whole nation.


August is the time to remember that two years ago ISIS took Yezidi and Christian areas in Iraq, killing, kidnapping, looting and forcing people from their homes.


Since then, many thousands of members of these communities have been living in tents and caravans all over the Kurdistan Region. Only the lucky ones were able to find more proper housing.


Many of them did not only lose their homes and land, but their family members too, as the group killed probably thousands during its rampage in the Shingal region. Some of them witnessed the killing of their family members.


We focus on the victims when we report on these tragedies. The women and girls who returned from their ordeal, the kids being able to escape a future as ISIS fighters, the men killed. Or, the other scenario: the women still with ISIS and suffering every day, and their kids being indoctrinated to kill their own.


But we hardly talk about the family members; those still waiting for relatives that are most probably dead, or who might never be able to escape from ISIS territories.
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Resilience in the face of adversity: Hardship brings out the strength of the Yezidi community

Through the ages the Kurds have been subject to attacks time and again. The Yezidi history counts over seventy attacks, some of them clear cases of genocides. The Kurds in general were the victim of dictatorships, persecution and genocide.

And through the times, often the victims of these atrocities, who survived, came out stronger. However terrible the suffering or the crimes committed, people have the talent to survive by holding on to the stick held out to them not to drown.

That goes in particular for the Yezidis and the Kurds. When their land was split over four nations, they put up a fight not to be crushed completely. When Arab regimes tried to Arabize them, their identity only became stronger.

The former Iraqi ruler Saddam Hussein tried to beat the resistance out of the Kurds, by gassing the Kurdish town of Halabja in 1988 which killed more than 5,000 people. And by destroying thousands of Kurdish villages and killing 180,000 in the Anfal campaign, he tried to destroy their urge for autonomy and independence.

Yet the opposite happened. The Kurds rose against Saddam when he was weak in 1991, and were able to turn the tables and get their autonomy.
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Lack of Kurdish unity endangers future disputed territories

Unity between the Kurdish parties is essential for the future of the disputed areas, says Nasreddin Saeed, the minister heading the General Board for Kurdistani Areas Outside the Kurdistan Region. These are generally known as the disputed areas that both the Kurds and Baghdad claim.

Saeed warns that Sinjar, the disputed Iraqi province that was for the most part liberated from the Islamic group ISIS in December, could fall apart.

Sinjar (or Shingal) was until the occupation by ISIS in August 2014 administrated mainly by Baghdad. Here ISIS murdered almost 2,000 members of the Yezidi population and kidnapped over 6,000 when it overran the area.

After the liberation, the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) has put in its own local government and police, but forces that were involved in the liberation have not yet left. Amongst them are not only Peshmerga troops of the main Iraqi Kurdish parties KDP and PUK, but also fighters of the Turkish Kurdish PKK and some Yezidi militias.

Saeed sees this as a major obstacle why Yezidis are hardly returning home to Sinjar – whilst in a comparable situation in Ramadi inhabitants have -- stressing that “after liberating the place, the forces should go and leave it to the people. Because of them, people are afraid of a new conflict.”
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So-called rescuer of Yezidis under fire

The scandal surrounding the claims of a Canadian businessman that he has rescued over a hundred Yezidi and Christian women and children who were kidnapped by the Islamic State has broadened. The families of the victims he claims to have helped had already been repaid by the Kurdistan government for the money spent freeing them.

Last week, 20 prominent Yezidis sent the Canadian businessman Steve Maman a letter requesting proof that he and his organization, Liberation of Christian and Yazidi Children of Iraq (CYCI), had rescued 128 people from the caliphate ISIS runs by paying a mere $80,000 in total.

In the letter they spoke of their doubts that this amount could serve to free so many people, as the sums paid per individual are much higher, and mentioned they had not found anyone who had actually been helped by Maman or CYCI.

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New book by Yezidi author aims to teach Arabs of ISIS brutality

It is because he owes it to the dozens of Kurdish Yezidi women he has spoken to regularly who were captives of the Islamic State that Kurdish journalist Khidher Domle says he wrote down their stories into a book.

His book, The Black Death, has been published to coincide with the first anniversary of the occupation of the Yezidi region of Shingal by ISIS on August 3, 2014. It paints the “tragedy of Yezidi women in the grip of ISIS,” according to its subtitle.

Among journalists in the Kurdistan Region, Domle is one of the most active on the issue. He is a Yezidi himself, and offered shelter to thousands of his people who fled ISIS from the Sinjar region last year. He set up a team to organize and manage a relief initiative in his village Sharya near Duhok.


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Bibles or Qurans, don't force them on the scarred Yezidis

Evangelical Christians have offered Bibles to internally displaced Kurdish Yezidis in aid camps in Iraqi Kurdistan, asking the refugees to convert to Christianity in order to start a new life in the West.

Some went in under the guise of aid workers, while others had only Bibles and prayers on offer. Even though this shocked many observers, the alarm that Yezidi parliamentarian Vian Dakhil raised was mainly followed by a resounding silence.

The only consequence so far has been an attempt by authorities to control who goes in and out of the camps by demanding a permit. This hampers the work of journalists reporting on the Yezidi issue, because a different permit now is needed for all the different camps.

Yet the permit-system does not deal with the moral issue: how can anyone who knows what the Yezidis suffered in the hands of radical Islamists of ISIS, and how precious their already threatened religion is to them, confront them with conversion?

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Freeing Yezidi women from ISIS’ clutches

Almost a year after ISIS overtook the Yezidi area of Sinjar and kidnapped thousands, the main way to free those still in the jihadists’ clutches is by buying them back through middlemen.

Since they were taken by ISIS last August as slaves and forced to convert to Islam, some 1,700 Yezidis have managed to escape. Many of them were able to run away, and with the help of locals, found their way out of the caliphate.

Some were helped by Kurdish aid workers who paid locals to help the girls escape. But in the past months, fewer and fewer women and girls were able to escape in this way. More and more, they have had to be rescued, or their freedom has had to be bought.

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Kurdistan Paintings to show the world what ISIS did to Iraq

His paintings show gruesome scenes of men being slaughtered and women raped; of fighters choosing and buying women that are undressed in front of them. Yezidi painter Ammar Salim, 31, is working on a project to tell the world what ISIS has done to his people.

In a series of nine canvasses, he paints a realistic picture of the tragedy that befell the Yezidi minority in Iraqi Kurdistan at the hands of ISIS in a style reminiscent of some European painters of the Middle Ages, who also packed their paintings with characters and scenes.

“I want to connect all that happened, to explain about the Yezidi genocide,” he said, walking from one painting to another in the small motel room in the Kurdish city of Duhok that is now his studio.

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What happened to Yezidi boys taken by ISIS?

Three male Yezidi children who had been kidnapped by ISIS have reportedly been killed in battle while fighting for the extremist group, according to a well-placed source.

The alleged deaths underscore an overlooked aspect of ISIS’ capture of over 5,000 Kurdish Yezidi men, women and children since August - a horrific story that has focused mostly on the fate of the women and girls who were taken by ISIS fighters as sex slaves and servants.

The report of the killing of these child soldiers begs the question: what happened to the boys?


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New massacre of Kurdish Yezidis proves to be a hoax

Earlier this week, the news went around the world: 300, perhaps as many as 600, Kurdish Yezidis held in captivity by the Islamic State were slaughtered in their village near the jihadists’ self-proclaimed  capital of Mosul.

Even the BBC, usually known for checking its sources well, ran the story on Saturday. It put the Yezidis in Iraq back into the spotlight. Their plight is incredibly painful, with more than 3,500 of them believed to be still in the hands of ISIS.

But the story about the massacre soon proved to be a hoax.

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