CWEH Activists Blog: 8 March 2018
Carol Yong

By sheer chance I had tuned in to a thought-provoking tv programme recently. It was a documentary on a Yezidi young woman talking about her life in ISIL (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant group) captivity and subsequent escape - after she had alredy been inflicted great torture bodily, psychological and emotional;  the most horrid part of the ordeal being raped repeatedly. Yet, the most telling cases were young women who rather commit suicide than be raped or, having been raped, felt too ashamed.

Political and human rights violations against the Kurds and Alevits, I know. But the Yezidis I don´t follow so closely, until recently, when I talked to a long-standing Kurdish rights activist. I also searched the word ¨yezidi¨ in the Internet. Not many mentions, but they appeared the most in 2014. That year, the plight of the Yezidis became a burning issue after some urgent stories and pictures started to leak out from Sinjar which the Islamic State (IS) jihadists had captured and set up camps. Well, yes, the contents and images were very disturbing, reported on the atrocities committed by IS on the Yezidis and targetted specially the women and girls, including forced slavery/marriage, sexual abuse and rapes.

Their greatest `crime´ was being Yezidis

The Yezidis are a Kurdish-speaking ethnic minority group inhabiting the high valleys around the Sinjar Mountains in the northwest region of Iraq. A region rich in natural resources and for many centuries have sustained the Yezidis´ livelihood as nomadic farmers and herders. Importantly, the 100-km long Sinjar Mountains is regarded as sacred by the Yezidis, and historically also a place of refuge and hideout during periods of conflicts. The Yezidis, as other ethnically Kurdish minorities, have been subjected to centuries of injustices and brutality (Stirbt der Engel Pfau - Geschichte, Religion und Zukunft der Yezidi-Kurden, Johannes Büchting, Nuh Ates 1992, Edition Komkar). Thus they are no strangers to conflicts and persecutions - be it political, ethnic, religious, human and/or gender rights violations. Some sources suggest that the Yezidis had experienced over 70 ethnic cleansing in their history. But they have courageously struggled on to defend their rights; often paying a high price - loss of human lives, internally displaced and so on.

The invasion of Sinjar had forced thousands of Yezidi women, men and children to flee from IS military violence, trekking dangerously for many long hours, day and night, across the mountain range. Those who survived the perilous journeys were fortunate to be rescued via corridors carved out by mostly Kurdish defenders, and taken to safer shelter camps bordering Syria. An overwhelming number of innocent civilians included children were reportedly killed or wounded. Young women seemed to be the prime targets being profitably used by the IS jihadists to be exploited, sold and traded among themselves as `sex-slaves´ in the name of religion

Yes, the Yezidis follow their own ancient religion born in the Mesopotamia a long, long time ago. But this is religiously impure - infidels and devil-worshippers, according to IS´s religious interpretations of Islam. In the battle zone of Sinjar, many Yezidi women and girls in IS captivity became vulnerable to torture, sexual abuse and rape - unimaginable horrors that IS jihadists hailed as their `religious duty` to wash away their sins and convert them to Islam, against their will, or risk torture or death (various sources online).

Pleas for help

Girls and women need extraordinary strength and support to survive the atrocities of war crimes, especially systematic rapes. Without the proper medical care provided by well-trained trauma specialists and the chance to be resettled in a country that takes refugees, little can be done to help them readjust their lives. Many Yezidi survivors are probably too traumatised or wounded to talk of the bombing, air strikes, mortar attacks, and more so the sexual abuse and rape of the women and girls.

The horror of rape, most often forced under gunpoint or other threats, left a very deep scar on the survivors - the result will be shame, guilt, fear, mistrust; thus continue to affect their futures. Yet there are some who picked up courage to talk about these painful experiences after some years of silences. As the case of the Yezidi woman who lived through it all, going on tv. She feels safe enough in her new home in Germany and wants the world to know about the ordeal of the Yezidis in general, and especially the vast numbers of Yezidis women and girls still in ISIL captivity; thus highly vulnerable to rape, sexual abuse and other forms of torture.

While the plight of the Yezidi women and girls aroused the attention of an array of human rights groups, humanitarian agencies, medical and church charities, the UN, the neighbouring countries and Western Governments were more worried about the situation in Syria spiraling out of control.  Consequently, the US finally sided with a Kurdish-led coalition of pro-Western fighters which could liberate a number of enslaved Yezidi girls and women, while the EU 'turned the goat into the gardener' by giving Turkey the responsibility to ‘guard the EU-border' against Yezidis fleeing the atrocities of IS and other terrorist groups.

No doubt many who have read or heard about the heart-wrenching stories of the Yezidi women and men were shocked by these criminal acts, others calling for interventions and concrete actions at the highest level to stop the systematic gender-based violence and the use of female slavery and rape as a political and religious weapon of war, in moden times. It sadly doesn´t surprise me that Sinjar was not the only ¨killing field¨, others included Aleppo, Mosul, Kobane, etc., etc. and most recently, in Syria´s Afrin-region where amongst others, thousands of Yezidi refugees are currently stuck between the Turkish army, radical-Islamist militias and Syrian government-forces.

More than just pledges

A lot of questions still to be asked. A lot more politically significant responses and actions need to be taken. So I heard about the Iraqi Donor Conference, held on 12th -14th February 2018. Germany pledged 350 million euros and the European Union, 400 million euros, for rebuilding war-torn Iraq. Evidence of the international community´s commitment to taking a stand on tackling the rise of IS?

No! There are several reasons behind my scepticism.

For one, I believe a main reason for the rise of IS was that the Iraqi government had before channelled public funds to shiites mainly. So the sunnis were easily convinced to join the extremists. Most refugees from the war-torn northern areas are in Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) provinces which are sealed off by the Iraqi government. There are no independent channel for aid there, especially for Yezidis due to religious persecution by governing shiites, as recent intrusions by shiites terrorists with tacid consent of the Iraq government has shown. In other words, the attacks on Yezidis by IS sunnis was because of negligence by Iraqi shiite-dominated government.^[1].

After the Kurdish independence referendum in 2017, the shiites irregular forces (armed shiites militias not controlled by the Iraqi government but allowed to join the war against IS) were said to be attacking Kirkuk and the Yezidis. These shiites militants were joined by the Turkmens, also shiites, living in northern Iraq competing resources with the Yezidis and prosecuting them. The Yezidis have had to flee to Kurdish-controlled regions - in the Iraqi constitution are 3 KRG areas, namely Arbil, Sulamenyi and Duhuk. (Gesellschaft für bedrohte Völker, Göttingen, 27.Oktober 2017)

As for the disputed areas, in the Iraqi constitution have been earmarked for normalisation, i.e. after all internally displaced refugees were allowed to return and to hold a referendum by 2007 but this never happened. The referendum was done only last autumn (2017), by the KRG government, but the Iraqis don´t recognised it. That means the Iraqi government has since 2007 been `ìllegally´ occuping these areas and exploiting the resources. (Kirkuk, Test für Iraks Stabilität, Birgit Cerha, Institut für Kurdologie, Wien 2009)

In the case of the Donor Conference and pledges done there, pause for a moment. How will all the money given to be distributed? From the past, it was always by the Iraqi central government, not  the provincial government or local administration. They will be using this elsewhere for their followers and not for the persecuted ones, and are preventing the Kurdish Regional Government to receive direct support via airports or border neighbouring countries.

Another frustrating problem is Turkey. The Turkish government is controlling the border and will be deciding who is getting illegal weapons and which refugees are allowed in or not allowed in; yet the Donor Conference is focussed only about Iraq. So it offers limited hope for resolving the real issues on the ground - perhaps the most daunting of which is military and state-sanctioned violence, and by extension, discriminatory cultural and religious interpretations which subjugated women and  ethnically minority groups.

Looking for answers

When I first started to write this post, to mark International Women´s Day on March 8, I knew very little about the Yezidis, not so much as a lack of interest but more due to the lack of literature. After some research online, I got a general picture of the Yezidis and their challenges. But I do find several of the contents and analysis sensational or controversial, but more importantly, they were missing crucial links to the real issues on the ground, past and present.

Currently, there is obviously a conflict about the control of oil-resources. But the persecution had been going on many centuries before oil became a valuable commodity. What does this tell us about competition for land and water resources? What is the connection to environmental degradation and climate change? It is in direct conversations with activists in Kurdish organisations that I found some answers. Ultimately, it links to the crucial question of powerful external forces - with money, arms, etc., etc. exploiting the very rich resources in Kurdish ethnic and religious minorities areas, competing for resources. But the reason the Jihadists militias give is that the Yezidis are devil worshipping, thus must be cleansed and converted to Islam at best, and punished at worse, which means torture, death, enslaving young women to capitalise on and trade as sex slaves.