Yazidis still face oppression after IS defeat

First, IS took their right to make decisions away from them but now various armed groups operating in the area do so as well

Shelly Kittleson

Yazidi women and children who fled to the Sinjar mountain after the Islamic State attacked the town of Sinjar. April 2015.

Yazidis still face oppression after IS defeat

Shelly Kittleson

last update on 03 Aug 2023

West Nineveh: “Sinjar is special,” the officer at the checkpoint said, refusing to allow me to continue on to the Yazidi homeland of Sinjar.

“You will have to go back.”

I had accompanied the Peshmerga as a reporter to the frontlines in the Sinjar mountains in early 2015 during the fight against the Islamic State.

I returned to the city to speak to those who had come back after it was retaken in 2016 when rockets were still being shot at some districts of the city and had, at that time, explored and photographed tunnels that IS had used to hide and keep munitions in.

Shelly Kittleson — A great deal of destruction remains in Sinjar years after it was liberated from the Islamic State. Nineveh province, Iraq. May 30, 2022

I had returned in 2022, to ask about the Sinjar agreement for stability and how the local population felt about it.

And yet now, in June 2023, despite having been invited by a prominent and widely respected member of the Yazidi community, I was told it was “too dangerous, it’s for your own safety” – as the first response. Then, “It’s a sensitive area”. Then, “You need extra permissions”.

And while some claim that Turkey’s targeting of local positions of those it says are linked to an international terrorist organisation – the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) - is an “attack on Iraqi sovereignty”, many of the Yazidis who have gone back feel they are denied their right to make even the most basic of personal decisions.

Over a hundred thousand Yazidis who fled Sinjar in 2014 are still in IDP camps in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, with no intention to go back until things improve.

Many Yazidis who have gone back feel they are denied their right to make even the most basic of personal decisions. Over 100,000 Yazidis who fled Sinjar in 2014 are still in IDP camps.

During the trip last year, I met with numerous Yazidis in Sinjar.

Some claimed that they were constantly denied agency, by everyone around them. That IS had taken their right to make decisions away from them but that the various armed groups operating in the area and others do continue to do so as well.

And that, now, the military and security forces don't even "allow us to invite people."

'Are we not Iraqis?'

"Are we not Iraqis? Who is going to return if we can't even invite anyone to our homes?"

One young man had said he wasn't pleased with those who "tried to tell us we should accept the children of the Islamic State" born to women who had been raped by IS.

Regardless of human rights, he stressed, the Yazidis were subjected to genocide. The survival of the community is the most important thing, he said: not the individual rights of the "IS children". Or even the rights of the women who might want to keep them.

In the end, he claimed, the matter should be left to "the families" to decide.

In leaving one home, an adolescent Yazidi girl ran up to me as she was about to leave, taking off her necklace. Take it, she insisted and almost started crying when an attempt was made to politely refuse the gift.

The girl had been cleaning the entire time, running to get food, scrubbing the floor, and following orders from her male relatives. She had not, however, been given a chance to say whether she had opinions on these issues, or what they might have been.

But her eyes were shining so brightly, so hopeful, as she waved goodbye.

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