Ten years ago Saturday, the Islamic State (IS) invaded Iraq’s Sinjar province, expelling, killing and enslaving hundreds of thousands of Yazidis. On Saturday morning, crowds gathered for a ceremony to commemorate the victims of the genocide at the “Tomb of the Mothers,” where 111 elderly women were shot to death or buried alive after being separated from their families.
The ceremony at the mass grave near the Yazidi Genocide Memorial in Soragh began at 10 a.m. and included a minute’s silence across the country. Traditional Yazidi songs were sung and poetry and eyewitness testimonies were read on stage.
Shiren Ibrahim Ahmed, 24, from Kojo village, was one of the thousands who gathered. “They brought us women from our villages to this laboratory here, and then they shot our mothers and grandmothers in these fields,” she said. Observer“We heard gunfire, but we haven’t heard from them since.” That same day, she was kidnapped by ISIS and taken as a slave.
She was moved from Sinjar to Mosul and then to Syria, where she remained for four years after being sold to ISIS members of Moroccan and Saudi Arabian nationality. “Tabqa, Deir ez-Zor, Raqqa… I was sold all over Syria and finally smuggled into Iraq in 2018,” she said. “The community paid $10,000 to get me back.” Her two sisters, who now live in Duhok, are also survivors of ISIS’s sex slavery campaign.
The bodies of Silen’s father and brother were exhumed from another mass grave, identified and buried in the village cemetery. The bodies of her mother and grandmother have not been handed over to the three sisters. A staggering 93 mass graves have been found across the state, excluding private graves.
Ten years after the genocide, only 243 of the 2,055 missing have been identified and buried.
Dr. Zaid Al Yousif, head of the General Directorate of Forensic Medicine in Baghdad, explained why: “DNA samples are difficult to obtain because most of the murdered Yazidis belonged to the same family. Many are refugees abroad. After years of work in Sinjar and Kurdistan, we started collecting DNA samples in Stuttgart, Germany last fall. We have reunited 600 people and taken blood samples. We will continue this work, and hopefully in Canada and Australia.”
According to the UN-recognized Yazidi Affairs Department of the Ministry of Religious Affairs, there were 550,000 Yazidis before 2014. Around 360,000 were displaced during the genocide, and only 150,000 were able to return to their homes.
At the beginning of the genocide, 1,293 Yazidis lost their lives. 2,745 Yazidi children were orphaned due to this tragedy. Approximately 100,000 Yazidis emigrated and sought refuge in Europe. A total of 6,417 people were kidnapped, of which 3,548 were women. Despite the horrific conditions, 3,550 people survived, of which 1,026 were women. The genocide also destroyed 68 Yazidi shrines.
On the eve of the anniversary, in the ruins of Sinjar’s old city, Yazidis held up photos of the missing on the rubble. Candles were lit and several women fainted as they recalled the pain they had endured over the past decade. The crowd remained silent as ambulances arrived.
“Every year this anniversary passes, but the reality is nothing has changed: To date, more than 100,000 Yazidis are living in displaced camps in Kurdistan,” said Salah Hassan, spokesman for the Nadia’s Initiative, an organization founded by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Nadia Murad.
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Murad, who spearheaded the installation of the genocide memorial at the request of the Yazidis, attended Saturday’s ceremony. “Negotiations are ongoing between the Iraqi and Kurdish governments, but we are still living in tents. We fear that this genocide will continue, the harsh reality that Yazidis live in Iraq, and that we will be exiled all over the world,” she added.
The Iraqi government has said it will continue to provide support to the refugee camps in Iraq’s Kurdistan region, which were originally scheduled to close last week, but has encouraged displaced people to return voluntarily to their original homes. Women abducted by ISIS can claim compensation under the Yazidi Survivors Law, which Iraq adopted in March 2021.
“Monthly salary is [800,000 Iraqi dinars] “That’s the only applicable provision of the law,” Silen said. “But active [search for] “What happens to the women who are missing in Syria? What about their right to education? Ten years ago they were in school and now they have not finished,” she says. She now works as a social facilitator with the Farida Global Organization, helping other women survivors cope with the trauma.
“It gives me a positive feeling to be able to support women who, like me, have endured extreme violence,” she said. “But this anniversary brings back sad memories and makes me think of my mother and grandmother who were killed in this grave. In war, it is usually men who are killed. The most painful thing for me about this genocide is that they killed our mothers. We should not have had to go through this.”
