Yazidis lured to Belarus find path to new life in Europe blocked
By the time Hussein Elias Khudir returned to Iraq on a repatriation flight from Belarus with his wife and mother last week, the Yazidi asylum seeker no longer had enough money for a taxi back to the displacement camp they had left two months earlier.
Having lived in the tent settlement outside the Kurdish city of Duhok since Islamic State militants forced them from their ancestral home near Mount Sinjar in 2014, the family had despaired of ever being able to return to their former lives. So when Alexander Lukashenko, the Belarusian dictator, indicated in June that in retaliation for Western sanctions he
‘The rain was freezing to our clothes. We were afraid we were going to die there’
would no longer stop migrants from crossing the border, Mr Khudir and his family joined the tens of thousands of migrants flying to Minsk in the hopes of reaching a better life in Europe.
Dreams of a life of dignity turned into a nightmare on the Belarusian border, leaving Mr Khudir, his mother, Naima Khidr Khalo, and wife, Ghazala Barakat, despondent and dependent on charity by the time they boarded an Iraqi government flight back on Thursday. “They won’t give us residency to live outside the camp, so how did we expect another country to let us in?” Mr Khudir, 36, asked with resignation when The Daily Telegraph visited his tent at Sharia camp.
The scars on his body attest to the persecution of the Yazidis that predated the attempted genocide of the religious minority by IS extremists.
After the US invasion of Iraq, his home in Til Ezer was targeted in a coordinated suicide car bomb attack that killed 796 people. Mr Khudir was among the 1,500 wounded.
Sunni Muslim extremists believe the Yazidi to be infidels and when IS fighters overran much of north-west Iraq in summer 2014, the minority group were targeted for eradication.
Thousands of men and women were killed and buried in mass graves, and thousands of women and children were kidnapped in what the United Nations later described as a genocide. “Of my relatives alone, IS took 74,” Mr Khudir said. “Only a few ever came back. All the men who went missing, we don’t know what happened to them.”
At least 500,000 Yazidi were forced into exile. Most have either left Iraq or remain in camps such as Sharia, a sprawling settlement of tents that has taken on some of the structure of a town but with few comforts.
Although IS was defeated militarily by mid-2017 few Yazidis have been able to return to Sinjar and their villages, many of which were destroyed by IS militants and coalition air strikes.
Today the region is disputed territory, claimed both by the federal government and the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG).
The presence of Iraqi federal forces, Shia militias, Kurdish Peshmerga, militants from the Kurdistan Workers’ Party and IS sleeper cells made the region dangerous for the Yazidis, Mr Khudir said. “All those armed groups are in conflict and that poses a threat to our people,” he said. “In the past four months four of our people went missing after returning to visit Sinjar.”
Even in the camp, Mr Khudir said, they were not safe. A massive fire tore through Sharia in June, burning 400 tents, with many families unable to save their belongings or documents.
The semi-autonomous KRG hopes the Yazidis will eventually return home and has prevented permanent construction in the camps and blocked residents from settling outside their bounds. “We do not belong anywhere here. We cannot go back to Sinjar, we cannot get residency to live outside the camp. Nobody would accept to live in a tent for this long,” Mr Khudir said.
In desperation this September Mr Khudir sold his possessions and his wife and mother’s gold jewellery to buy tickets to Belarus. Once there they found it was no simple matter to cross the border and quickly depleted their savings. “We walked for 10 days and 10 nights,” Mrs Khalo, 55, said.
They became lost in forests along the border. “We went four days without water,” she said.
Twice they made it into Poland but were turned back by border guards, Mr Khudir said, after smugglers they had paid to drive them to Germany failed to appear. As the weather dipped below zero, the situation became perilous. “The rain was freezing to our clothes. We were afraid we were going to die there,” Mr Khudir said.
Out of money and fearing for their lives, the family decided to return to Iraq. “All we have is each other,” Mrs Khalo said.
Three days after returning home Mr Khudir’s wife was visibly traumatised.
Walking outside the tent, Mrs Barakat collapsed and had to be carried inside. Mr Khudir said that if they were able, they would try again to reach Europe. “We just want to live somewhere where they won’t kill us,” he said. “We just want to be safe, we don’t want to live in fear of tent fires or IS bombing us.”
His mother agreed, but added: “If we had a dignified life here, we would never think of leaving.”