In the summer of 2014, I was preparing for my last semester at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Like many of my fellow Yazidis, I had moved to America thanks to its Special Immigrant Visa programme, having previously worked for five years with the US military in Iraq as a translator and cultural adviser.
But in July, my whole world stopped. News had reached us that ISIS, which had already terrorised parts of Syria, was planning an attack on Sinjar in northern Iraq. They were targeting this rural part of the country because it was the ancestral homeland of my Yazidi community.
Living an agonising 10,000 kilometres away, there was little the Yazidi diaspora in Nebraska could do. I remember being on a Skype call with my younger brother, who was just 14 years old at the time, trying to help my family come up with a plan to escape.
Looking at the screen, I could see them panicking. They were collecting their IDs and documents, preparing to flee a brutal terrorist group that was bearing down on a place Yazidis had called home for generations.
My family packed as much as they could into their small lorry and began their drive into the unknown. They did not have room for my sister and her family, who lived on the opposite side of the village and didn’t have a car.
ISIS began its genocide of the Yazidi people in the scorching-hot morning of August 3, 2014. The group’s fighters conquered most of the district within hours, but could not reach the top of Mount Sinjar, to which tens of thousands of Yazidis had fled and become trapped.
Eventually, some Yazidis crossed into Syria, while others made their way to different parts of Iraq. Today, hundreds of thousands remain displaced. During its campaign of terror, ISIS not only committed mass killings but also abducted more than 6,500 women and children; more than 2,000 are thought to remain captive in camps like Al Hol in Syria, as well as in prisons and at the mercy of human traffickers. Not content with murder, kidnap and torture, the fighters also destroyed much of Sinjar’s infrastructure and cultural heritage. They wanted to annihilate us – no trace of our lives or traditions were to remain.
We marked the 10th anniversary of the Yazidi genocide earlier this month and our community remains resilient in the face of adversity. While much of the western world has been sympathetic to the Yazidi cause, solidarity alone will not help our people recover from the deep scars of the 2014 atrocities.
Today, my fellow Yazidis and I call on governments and international organisations to provide the support needed to fully rebuild and sustainably resettle Sinjar. We must also prevent an ISIS resurgence in the region, hold its former fighters to account and rescue the more than 2,500 Yazidi women and girls who remain missing still to this day.
The 2003 western invasion of Iraq came with promises of prosperity, opportunity and freedom. However, soon after Saddam Hussein's regime fell, there was a significant rise in terrorist attacks against the Yazidi community and other minority groups in the region. This violence was accompanied by a wave of misinformation about our religious and cultural beliefs, ignited by the rapidly expanding influence of social media; this ultimately laid the foundation for the 2014 genocide.
When coalition forces withdrew from Iraq in 2010, they did not ensure the security of groups like the Yazidis. Gradually, a security vacuum emerged, and ISIS took advantage of that to carry out their genocidal attack against our community. By August 3, 2014 – the day the genocide began – all members of the security forces had fled their positions, leaving the Yazidis completely defenceless.
It is important that the US and other countries have recognised these atrocities as genocide, and have responded to the community with empathy. However, these sentiments have rarely translated into tangible support. So much of our community in Iraq still lives in limbo, with militia groups vying for control of their homeland. In addition to the thousands of missing women and children, tens of thousands of Yazidis are still displaced in camps and dozens of mass graves have yet to be exhumed.
The US, UK and other western countries that played a significant role in the war have a moral responsibility to support the Yazidis, who have unfairly and disproportionately faced the consequences of nearly two decades of conflict. Moreover, these countries must recognise that a strong, effectively governed Sinjar, populated by Yazidis fully empowered to reclaim their homeland, is one of the most effective tools to prevent the resurgence of a terrorist group that threatened not only northern Iraq, but people around the world.
To fulfil their moral obligation and deliver on a key counter terror objective, these countries must help Yazidis rebuild their homeland, prosecute former ISIS fighters and work with regional security actors to rescue the women and children who remain in ISIS’s hands.
Unitad, the UN’s mechanism to promote accountability for ISIS crimes – whose Security Council mandate may soon expire – has unearthed troves of physical and digital evidence of the group’s atrocities, going to great lengths to identify the fighters who travelled to Iraq and Syria, only to return to European countries after the fall of the "caliphate". It is both morally unconscionable and a public danger to allow such individuals to carry on with their daily lives after participating in such heinous acts.
Domestic judiciaries must take seriously the legal imperative to try, convict and imprison these former fighters, thereby signalling to ISIS – and to all those worldwide who seek to use sexual violence as a weapon of war – that their actions have consequences.
And so, Yazidis watch and wait. We wonder whether the world will finally act to support our communities and take steps to prevent future terrorist activity and genocide – or, whether we should instead be waiting for the return of ISIS, and a repeat of the chaos and bloodshed that upended our lives a decade ago.
