Yazidis Genocide: Small Steps to Justice

IS killed thousands of Yazidi men in Syria and Iraq between 2014 and 2017 and kept women as sex slaves. Many Yazidis are still missing. Coming to terms with the crimes is slow.

Yazidi women mourn their relatives with loud shouts – their brothers, fathers, uncles, but also mothers and sisters: the funeral procession in northern Iraq is hundreds of meters long, as videos on social media show. The bereaved carry narrow coffins with large photos of the deceased: There are 41 Yazidis who were buried a few weeks ago in the village of Kocho.

A mourner told the AFP news agency: “In recent months, numerous bodies have been identified from the mass graves, including five of my family members, my brothers and their children. Now my brother’s wife and uncle have also been found and buried. They tear every day Wounds open again. It’s very difficult! “

“They wanted to kill us”

Between 2014 and 2017, the self-proclaimed “Islamic State” killed thousands of Yazidis – an independent ethnic group, an ethnic-religious minority mainly in Syria and Iraq. Yazidis are monotheists, they believe in one God, but also worship angels.

IS saw them as devil worshipers. Those who did not want to convert to Islam were murdered, survivors told Al Arabiya: “It is difficult for any family. There are families where none survived and there are families in which only one person, a boy or a girl survives has.”

Several international organizations and states have classified the crimes of IS against the Yazidis as genocide. Survivors report mass shootings. A young man survived such a shooting by accident: “IS shot me, four bullets hit me. When we fled, they chased us, they wanted to kill us one after the other.”

The IS fighters used a specific form of violence against unmarried Yezidi girls and women: They systematically raped them, sometimes keeping them as sex slaves for years. “I was just a child, I was 14 years old at the time. They came and raped me,” recalls one survivor. “I had no other choice. Every time I refused, they would punish me, lock me in a room or beat me. They even starved me as a punishment.”

Searching for the dead using DNA

In the past few years, the IS could be pushed back, no longer controls a contiguous area. And so the genocide can gradually be dealt with. In Iraq, this means that one mass grave after the other is opened and the bodies identified. The International Commission for Missing Persons, or ICMP for short, also supports this.

The Iraq director of ICMP Alexander Hug says in an interview with the ARD: “It’s a complicated and lengthy process. The graves have to be found first, then the graves have to be excavated – some of which contain a hundred, if not a thousand human remains.” The human remains would then be sampled for DNA profiling.

There is a lack of will

The investigators match the DNA profiles of the dead with the DNA of surviving relatives and thus identify the victims. But thousands of Yazidis are still missing – the process is dragging on. Among other things, say observers, because the Iraqi government lacks the political will to solve the crimes.

“The identification of the dead is making slow progress,” complains Hug. It is therefore important that the state show more political will to find all missing people, no matter how these people disappeared. “And then it also makes it possible for the families of the missing people to come to an end here.”

Slow progress, but initial processes

The Yazidis are still a long way from justice and systematic punishment for IS criminals. But there are the first trials, including in Germany – the largest Yazidi diaspora community now lives here. There are also investigations in Iraq. Finding and opening the mass graves will help. Even if it’s a race against time. Because identifying the dead becomes more and more difficult the longer it takes to come to terms with the crimes.

To speed up the process, the International Commission on Missing Persons is also working with surviving Yazidi families. “It does this through education, training, and grant programs that aim to educate family members and others,” explains Hug. “Because only those who know what rights he or she has can sue the government.”

Grade funerals are considered an important step in the grieving process. The fact that the Yazidis can gradually bury their dead also has a personal value: it gives the bereaved certainty. That can help overcome the trauma of crime.