The unnoticed genocide of the Yazidis
Daesh attack on ethnic group met with little response from international community
Two years ago, Iraq’s ancient Yazidi minority experienced one of the darkest moments in its long and troubled history.
Daesh attacked its homeland in the northwestern Sinjar region, killed some 5,000 men and older women, kidnapped and enslaved thousands of girls and women, and forcibly recruited boys as child soldiers. The United Nations declared the massive assault genocide. On Wednesday, a UN commission investigating human rights abuses said that Daesh is still committing genocide and other crimes against the Yazidis. And it made an urgent call for the international community to turn its attention to the “rescue, protection of and care for the Yazidi community.” So far there has been little response. “Two years after Sinjar, Yazidis are very frightened,” said Mirza Ismail, a Toronto-based Yazidi advocate. “They can be attacked at any time, even in refugee camps. They need protection, but even when the UN says they suffered genocide, the world doesn’t seem to understand.”
Although the horrors experienced by the Yazidis — and especially the women and girls who escaped rape, torture and enslavement by Daesh — made headlines around the world in August 2014, tens of thousands are living in miserable conditions as displaced people in Iraq, and refugees in Turkey. Some 3,200 women and girls are still in captivity, subjected to systematic rape by jihadists who target them as infidels.
Canada and other countries have been asked to do more to ensure the Yazidis’ security and to relocate them from a region where their safety is precarious at best.
Kurdish forces, backed by U.S.-led coalition airstrikes, took back former Yazidi territory around Mt. Sinjar six months ago. But most of the main town has been destroyed, and the danger of a new assault looms.
“There are no services to come back to,” a shopkeeper living on the bleak mountain terrain above the town told The Associated Press. “If I come back, (Daesh) are still in all these villages around here.”
“The world has not been responsive to humanitarian crises like this,” said Michel Aziza, a volunteer with Operation Ezra, a Winnipeg-based coalition of Jewish and multi-faith communities struggling to bring Yazidi refugees to Canada.
“We talk about genocide as something in history. But it is going on today, and we can save these people from extermination.”
The group has raised funds to sponsor seven families, two of whom have arrived after a year of bureaucratic processing. And, Aziza says, more should be done to expedite their departure from refugee camps in Turkey, as well as in Iraq, where they are considered displaced but not officially refugees.
Last month, the House of Commons Immigration Committee held a series of hearings on the plight of the Yazidis, concluding that the government should accelerate asylum applications and “create and implement special measures” to speed the process for vulnerable survivors.
On Wednesday, the immigration department said in an email that it was now “putting plans into place to process (government-assisted and privately sponsored) refugee cases out of northern Iraq, which may include working with our international processing partners on the ground and/or video interviews.”
That would bring relief to those languishing in nine camps in the Kurdish region, most of them in Dohuk, an hour’s drive from the Daesh stronghold of Mosul, which Iraqi troops are planning to attack.
Payam Akhavan, a McGill University law professor who has just returned from meeting with Yazidis in Kurdistan, said that they are enduring temperatures of 45 C in camps where “basic physical needs are reasonably covered. What is overlooked, however, are the psychotherapeutic needs of survivors. There are young girls that have been repeatedly raped, children that have seen their mothers and fathers butchered. They are deeply traumatized and need to heal.”
Healing would be helped, he added, by recognition of their suffering through documentation of their experiences and evidence obtained from mass graves, a process that is currently struggling for funds. And Yazidis’ former homes should be made safe so that they could eventually return.
Apart from streamlining Ottawa’s refugee process, says Peter Fragiskatos, a Liberal MP and member of the House Foreign Affairs and International Development Committee, “we need a whole government approach that will help to restore stability and the torn social fabric. Not every Yazidi can be resettled. But there is also humanitarian aid and training of security forces, where Canada is well positioned to help.”
For Yazidis who are survivors or continuing victims of Daesh brutality, help cannot come too soon, say human rights advocates.
“There is no doubt in my mind that (Daesh) targeted Yazidis for sexual violence with the intent to destroy the Yazidi population,” said Zainab Hawa Bangura, the UN secretary general’s envoy on sexual violence in conflict.
“The pattern of abduction, rape, sexual slavery, forced marriage, forced pregnancy, forced abortion and human trafficking continues to this day.”