ISIL’s evil brutalization of Yazidis
Of all the oppressed and terrorized minorities fated to live through this grim era, the Yazidis of northern Iraq are clearly among the most wretched.
Through no fault of their own they are enemies of the most venomous faction on the planet, the Islamic State, or ISIL. A newsletter from ISIL described Yazidis as a pagan minority and claimed that their continued existence “is a matter that Muslims should question as they will be asked about it on Judgment Day.”
In other words, the Islamic State must obliterate the Yazidis out of religious duty or face divine punishment. Their existence as heretics after nine or 10 centuries is, by a perverse form of theology, an offence to a jealous god who demands total belief, the version of god that ISIL worships. Several countries are trying to help the Yazidis; Canada will accept 1,200 of them as refugees this year. But it will be generations before time can heal their wounds.
The most terrible event in their recent history took place in August, 2014, when I SIL militants attacked Sinjar, the northern Iraq home of tens of thousands of Yazidis. About 5,000 were killed and 7,000 taken away. Males were shot. Women and girls were turned over to markets where they were sold into sexual slavery. A UN report speculates that about 3,200 women and children are still held by ISIL or the slave owners who were the customers of ISIL.
The bosses of ISIL justify slavery by scripture and manage the profits with bureaucratic thoroughness. As Fawaz A. Gerges of the London School of Economics writes in his recent book, ISIS: A History, the Islamic State has a Department of War Spoils. It governs slavery sales and specifies the contracts that are notarized by Islamic courts. Aside from raising money to pay for guns, bombs and drones, the offer of female slaves “has become an established and increasingly powerful recruiting tool to lure men from deeply conservative Muslim societies.”
Yazda, an international organization that advocates for the Yazidis, estimates that at least 35 mass grave sites of Yazidis have been identified. Those who escaped killing or enslavement eventually reached ramshackle refugee camps in Turkey and Greece.
The Yazidis speak a version of Kurdish. Their religion combines elements of Christianity ( baptism, for instance) and Islam and Judaism ( circumcision). They worship a Peacock Angel, one of the seven angels they consider important. Those who call them pagans claim they are devil- worshippers. They have no holy book and pass their doctrine down by word of mouth. They don’t accept converts and marry only within their religion, rules that make it harder to maintain a sustainable population.
At the moment the Yazidis are hoping to arrange punishment for ISIL leaders. Amal Clooney, a leading human rights lawyer (and wife of the actor George Clooney) has joined their cause. She’s gathering evidence to bring a charge of genocide against the Islamic State — the mass graves, the eyewitnesses, and the many videos and written statements in which ISIL boasts and threatens, always with pride in its atrocities.
Clooney hopes to see ISIL leaders tried by the International Criminal Court at The Hague. “If the ICC can’t prosecute the world’s most evil terror group,” she asks, “what is it there for?” Cases at the ICC often take a long time, and an effective verdict depends on capturing the accused. Even so, it can provide justice of a kind, sometimes the only kind ever available. A German court recently issued an arrest warrant for an ISIL commander (whose name is undisclosed for the moment) allegedly responsible for genocide against the Yazidis.
Clooney’s partner in the genocide campaign is Nadia Murad, a living piece of evidence. Born in an Iraqi village, Murad was captured as a 21- year- old, enslaved and brutally raped. She escaped from her captors and lived to tell the tale. Unlike most Yazidi women like her, she’s willing to describe being raped — she tells about it in speeches ( including one at the UN) that bring listeners to tears.
She witnessed genocide in action: six of her brothers and stepbrothers were murdered, and so was her mother. Murad was raped daily by a jihadi. During one of her attempts to escape a guard stopped her and put her in a room with several guards, “who proceeded to commit their crime until I fainted,” she told Robert Guest in an interview with the Economist.
The more we learn about the Islamic State, the more questionable its claims appear. They sell a long, complicated story about their place in history, their theology and their caliphate, all of which sounds increasingly dubious. Their doctrine may entice lonely and sex-starved young men who are desperate for excitement. Their actions, though, look like nothing but well-organized thuggery hiding behind medieval superstition.
IT WILL BE GENERATIONS BEFORE TIME CAN HEAL THE WOUNDS.