What has become of the Yazidis?

In the early hours of 3 August 2014, twelve years ago, Islamic State launched a coordinated attack across the Sinjar region in northern Iraq, the homeland of the Yazidis: the attack originated from Mosul and Tal Afar in Iraq, and from al-Shaddadi and the Tel Hamis region in Syria, besieging the Yazidis from all four sides. In the hours and days that followed, with appalling speed and brutality, around 12,000 Yazidis were killed or abducted. The Islamic State adopted a systematic approach: women, girls and young girls were forcibly converted, transferred to detention centres across Iraq and Syria, and used as sabaya – sex slaves – or forced brides for Islamic State fighters; Yazidi boys were torn from their families, radicalised and trained as child soldiers; older boys and men who refused to convert – and sometimes even those who agreed to do so – as well as women past childbearing age, were either shot or had their throats slit and were thrown into mass graves; those who survived the initial executions were used as soldiers or forced labourers.

A further 250,000 Yazidis living in the Mount Sinjar area set out on a journey to try to escape the Islamist fury of Islamic State: many died of starvation in the scorching heat, others managed to find refuge, whilst still others have since been working to search for and locate the ‘missing’, who are predominantly women and number around three thousand. Among the women abducted and enslaved was Nadia Murad, who was 21 at the time: they killed her mother – who was too old to be of use to the slave-traders – and her six brothers in front of her; they abducted her, beat her, tortured her and raped her. She managed to escape because a terrorist forgot to lock the door. In 2018, Murad won the Nobel Peace Prize; she searches for the missing women, denounces the use of sexual violence as a weapon of repression and, above all, reminds the world of what it forgot after just a few months, distracted and oblivious as it was.