The Yazidi genocide also known as the 74th firman by Yazidis, was perpetrated by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria between 2014 and 2017. It was characterized by massacres, genocidal rape, and forced conversions to Islam. The Yazidis are a Kurdish-speaking ethnoreligious group who practice Yazidism and who are indigenous to Kurdistan.
Over a period of three years, Islamic State militants trafficked thousands of Yazidi women and girls and killed thousands of Yazidi men. The United Nations reported that the Islamic State killed about 5,000 Yazidis and trafficked about 10,800 Yazidi women and girls in a "forced conversion campaign" throughout Iraq. By 2015, upwards of 71% of the global Yazidi population had been displaced by the genocide, with most Yazidi refugees having fled to Iraq's Kurdistan Region and Syria's Rojava. The persecution of Yazidis, along with other religious minorities, took place after the Islamic State's Northern Iraq offensive of June 2014.
Amid numerous atrocities committed by the Islamic State, the Yazidi genocide attracted international attention and prompted the United States to establish CJTF–OIR, a military coalition consisting of many Western countries and Turkey, Morocco, and Jordan. Additionally, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia made emergency airdrops to support Yazidi refugees who were trapped in the Sinjar Mountains due to the Islamic State's Northern Iraq offensive of August 2014. During the Sinjar massacre, in which the Islamic State killed and abducted thousands of trapped Yazidis, the United States and the United Kingdom began carrying out airstrikes on the advancing Islamic State militants, while the People's Defense Units and the Kurdistan Workers' Party jointly formed a humanitarian corridor to evacuate the rest of the Yazidi refugees from the Sinjar Mountains.
The United Nations and several other organizations, including the Council of Europe and the European Union, have designated the anti-Yazidi campaign by the Islamic State as a genocide, as have the United States, Canada, Armenia, and Iraq.
Background
Yazidis and the Yazidi religion
The Yazidis are indigenous to Kurdistan and practice Yazidism, an Iranian ethnoreligion derived from the Indo-Iranian tradition. They are monotheists who worship Melek Taus, a benevolent angel who appears as a peacock. The Islamic State (IS) and some other Muslims in the region view the peacock angel as the malevolent creature Lucifer or Shaitan and they consider the Yazidis 'devil worshippers'. IS does not consider Yazidis as People of the Book or eligible for Dhimmi and related protections; which Islam offers to a wide variety of minority religions. The Yazidi community historically recorded their persecution; the persecution by the Islamic State is considered their 74th genocide.
Persecution of Yazidis
During the Ottoman period
- In 1640, 40,000 Ottoman soldiers attacked Yazidi communities around Mount Sinjar, killing 3,060 Yazidis in battle, then raiding and setting fire to 300 Yazidi villages and murdering 1,000–2,000 Yazidis who had taken refuge in caves around the town of Sinjar;
- in 1832–1834, the Sunni Kurdish emir Mir Muhammad of Rawanduz launched a genocidal campaign, known Firmana Mîrê Kore, against Yazidis in the Sheikhan and Sinjar regions of present-day northern Iraq. Triggered by religious fatwas declaring Yazidis as infidels and fueled by intertribal conflict, the campaign resulted in mass killing, enslavement, and forced conversion across Yazidi settlements. It is considered the bloodiest event in recorded Yazidi history, with estimates of between 70,000 and 135,000 Yazidis killed and survivors numbering only around 5% of the targeted population.
- in 1892, Sultan Abdulhamid II ordered a campaign of mass conscription or murder of Yazidis as part of his campaign to Islamize the Ottoman Empire, which also targeted Armenians and other Christians.
In post-2003 Iraq
- In April 2007, a bus in Mosul was hijacked. Muslims and Christians were told to get off, while the remaining 23 Yazidi passengers were driven to an eastern Mosul location and murdered.
- In August 2007, two Yazidi communities, in Qahtaniyah (just south of Sinjar) and Jazeera (Siba Sheikh Khidir), near Mosul, were hit by a total of four vehicle bombs carrying two tons of explosives, leaving 336–500 dead and 1,500 injured. Perpetrators are unknown; the U.S. saw "al-Qaeda as the prime suspect" because of the scale and the co-ordinated nature of the bombings.
Rise of the Islamic State
Offensive into Kurdish-controlled Iraq
On 3 August 2014, IS militants attacked and took over Sinjar in northern Iraq, a Kurdish-controlled town that was predominantly inhabited by Yazidis, and the surrounding area.
Yazidis, and internet postings of IS, have reported summary executions that day by IS militants, leading to 200,000 civilians fleeing Sinjar, of whom around 50,000 Yazidis were reportedly escaping to the nearby Sinjar Mountains. They were trapped on Mount Sinjar, surrounded by IS militants and facing starvation and dehydration.
On 4 August 2014, Prince Tahseen Said, Emir of the Yazidi, issued a plea to world leaders calling for assistance on behalf of the Yazidi facing attack from IS.
Massacres of Yazidis
On 3 August 2014, IS killed the men from the al-Qahtaniya area, ten Yazidi families fleeing were attacked by IS; and IS shot 70 to 90 Yazidi men in Qiniyeh village.
On 4 August, IS fighters attacked Jabal Sinjar, and killed 30 Yazidi men; 60 more Yazidi men were killed in the village of Hardan. On the same day, Yazidi community leaders stated that at least 200 Yazidis had been killed in Sinjar (see Sinjar massacre), and 60–70 near Ramadi Jabal.
According to reports from surviving Yazidis, between 3 and 6 August, more than 50 Yazidi were killed near Dhola village, 100 in Khana Sor village, 250–300 in Hardan area, more than 200 on the road between Adnaniya and Jazeera, dozens near al-Shimal village, and on the road from Matu village to Jabal Sinjar.
On 10 August, according to statements by the Iraqi government, IS militants buried alive an undefined number of Yazidi women and children in northern Iraq in an attack that killed 500 people.
Those who escaped across the Tigris River into Kurdish-controlled areas of Syria on 10 August gave accounts of how they had seen individuals also attempting to flee who later died.
On 15 August, in the village of Kojo, south of Sinjar, after more than 300 Yazidi families had received the ultimatum to convert to Sunni Islam or be killed, over 80 men were killed.
A witness recounted that the villagers were first converted under duress, but when the village elder refused to convert, all of the men were taken in trucks under the pretext of being led to Sinjar and gunned down along the way.
According to reports from survivors interviewed by OHCHR, on 15 August, the entire male population of the Yazidi village of Khocho, up to 400 men, were rounded up and shot by IS, and up to 1,000 women and children were abducted; on the same day, up to 200 Yazidi men were reportedly executed for refusing conversion in a Tal Afar prison.
Between 24 and 25 August 14 elderly Yazidi men were executed by IS in the Sheikh Mand Shrine, and the Jidala village Yazidi shrine was blown up. On 1 September, the Yazidi villages of Kotan, Hareko and Kharag Shafrsky were set afire by IS, and on 9 September, Peshmerga fighters discovered a mass grave containing the bodies of 14 executed civilians, presumably Yazidis.
According to an OHRCR/UNAMI report on 26 September, by the end of August, 1,600–1,800 or more Yazidis who had been murdered, executed, or died from starvation.
In early October, Matthew Barber, a scholar of Yazidi history at the University of Chicago, estimated that 5,000 Yazidi men had been killed by IS.
According to the United Nations, IS had massacred 5,000 Yazidi men and kidnapped about 7000 Yazidi women and girls (who were forced into sex slavery) in northern Iraq in August 2014.
In May 2015, the Yazidi Progress Party released a statement in which they said that 300 Yazidi captives were killed on 1 May by IS in the Tal Afar, Iraq.
A 2017 survey by the PLOS Medicine journal significantly decreased the number of Yazidis killed however concurrently raised the number abducted with 2,100 to 4,400 deaths and 4,200 to 10,800 abductions.
Violence against Yazidi women and girls
Rape and sexual slavery
The 2017 report of the United Nations Secretary-General on conflict-related sexual violence detailed the brutal attacks on Mosul, Sinjar, Tall'Afar, and the Ninewa plains in the north and subjection of civilians to sexual violence on a horrific scale primarily against women and girls from ethnic and religious minority groups. According to declarations, 971 Yazidi women and girls have been freed while 1,882 remained enslaved in Iraq and Syria. Forced transfer of Yazidis from Mosul to Raqqah (Syria), trafficking, the sale and trade of women and children, and the use of sexually enslaved women as human shields by IS during the Mosul operations were also reported.
Abductions
On 3 August, IS abducted women and children from the al-Qahtaniya area, and 450–500 abducted Yazidi women and girls were taken to Tal Afar; hundreds more to Si Basha Khidri and then Ba'aj. When IS fighters attacked Jabal Sinjar on 4 August, they abducted a number of women in the Yazidi village of Hardan, wives and daughters were abducted; other Yazidi women were abducted in other villages in the area. On 6 August, IS kidnapped 400 Yazidi women in Sinjar to sell them as sex slaves. According to reports from surviving Yazidi, between 3 and 6 August 500 Yazidi women and children were abducted from Ba'aj and more than 200 from Tal Banat. According to a statement by the Iraqi government on 10 August 2014, hundreds of women were taken as slaves in northern Iraq. On 15 August, in the Yazidi village of Kojo, south of Sinjar, over 100 women were abducted, though according to some reports from survivors, up to 1,000 women and children of the Yazidi village of Khocho were abducted. According to an OHRCR/UNAMI report on 26 September, by the end of August up to 2,500 Yazidis, mostly women and children, had been abducted.
The abducted Yazidi women were sold into slave markets with IS "using rape as a weapon of war" according to CNN, with the group having gynaecologists ready to examine the captives. Yazidi women were physically observed, including examinations to see if they were virgins or if they were pregnant. Women who were found to be pregnant were taken by the IS gynaecologists and forced abortions were performed on them.
Sex trafficking
Haleh Esfandiari, a professor at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, highlighted the abuse of local women by IS militants after they captured an area. "They usually take the older women to a makeshift slave market and try to sell them. The younger girls ... are raped or married off to fighters", she said, adding, "It's based on temporary marriages, and once these fighters have had sex with these young girls, they just pass them on to other fighters."
Speaking about Yazidi women who were captured by IS, Nazand Begikhani said in October 2014, "These women have been treated like cattle ... They have been subjected to physical and sexual violence, including systematic rape and sex slavery. They've been exposed in markets in Mosul and in Raqqa, Syria, carrying price tags." Yazidi girls in Iraq allegedly raped by IS fighters have committed suicide by jumping to their death from Mount Sinjar, as described in a witness statement.
A United Nations report issued on 2 October 2014, based on 500 interviews with witnesses, said that IS took 450–500 women and girls to Iraq's Nineveh region in August where "150 unmarried girls and women, predominantly from the Yazidi and Christian communities, were reportedly transported to Syria, either to be enslaved to IS fighters as a 'reward' or to be sold as sex slaves".
Also in October 2014, a UN report revealed that IS had detained 5,000 to 7,000 Yazidi women as slaves or forced brides in northern Iraq in August 2014.
On 4 November 2014, Dr. Widad Akrawi of Defend International said that "the international community should define what's happening to the Yezidis as a crime against humanity, crime against cultural heritage of the region and ethnic cleansing", adding that Yazidi females are being "subjected to as systematic gender-based violence and the use of slavery and rape as a weapon of war."
A month earlier, President of Defend International dedicated her 2014 International Pfeffer Peace Award to the Yazidis, Christians and all residents of Kobane because, she said, facts on the ground demonstrate that these peaceful people are not safe in their enclaves, partly because of their ethnic origin and/or religion and they are therefore in urgent need for immediate attention from the global community. She asked the international community to make sure that the victims are not forgotten; they should be rescued, protected, fully assisted and compensated fairly.
In June 2017, reports from Vian Dakhil of the Iraqi parliament told of a captured sex slave being fed her own one-year-old child. The woman was starved for three days in a cellar and was finally given a meal by her captors. When finished, they said "We cooked your one-year-old son that we took from you, and this is what you just ate".
A young woman described her experience in a 2023 documentary Daughters of the Sun: "A man bought me. He was an Iraqi, from Til Afar. He was 24 years old ... I was his slave and had to take care of his children. He hit me all the time. I was with that family for three years. Not a day went by when he didn't hit me. Most of the time I couldn't see because my eyes were swollen."