By Vicken Cheterian
Barzan Jurdo is 29 years old. He has already spent nine of those years in a refugee camp. We are sitting in front of a plastic tent – his temporary home – in Qasr Nisrin, Iraq. He escaped his home in Sinjar, also in Iraq, on August 3, 2014, when ISIS attacked the town and the Yazidi villages around it, killing, kidnapping, raping, and enslaving residents. It has already been years since ISIS was defeated and driven out of Sinjar, but Jurdo still cannot return home.
“Our house is destroyed, and we do not have the means to rebuild it,” he explained, adding that “also Sinjar is not safe, there are numerous armed groups there.”
Qasr Yazdin is in Duhok province in Iraq’s autonomous Kurdistan Region. It is an unofficial camp that houses some 200 Yazidi families, each with horror stories to tell. This little refugee village is not far from another camp in Khanke that is under the United Nations supervision but offers minimal health and education services. Why does Jurdo not live there?
“Because there is no place inside the camp”, he answers. “I think I will try and leave Iraq. Here there is no future. Especially for Yazidis.”
ISIS spread its horrors on Sinjar from August 3, 2014 to November 13, 2015, when Kurdish and Yazidi fighters, supported by coalition airstrikes, retook the town. Yet only a small number of its former inhabitants went back home. The city itself, which once had 70,000 residents, has no more than 2,000 now.
“Hardly 150,000 from the original 400,000 returned to their homes” Mirza Dinnayi, a prominent Yazidi rights activist and community leader, told me. Most of them have returned to villages to the north of Mount Sinjar.
“Another 100,000 have left the country,” Dinnayi continued. “No Yazidi, no Christian will feel secure, because they ask, ‘What will happen if another Daesh (ISIS) comes?’”
The security issue is the major obstacle for Yazidis to return to their homes. Sinjar – or Shingal, as the locals call it – has become a bone of contention between rival political groups and their armed factions. The Kurdish Democratic Party, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, the Iraqi army, and the Iraqi Popular Mobilization Forces all control parts of the region. Moreover, the Turkish military carries out regular air raids against Kurdish guerrillas in the Sinjar mountains and threatens from time to time to carry out a major military attack. This power struggle, alongside the lack of any serious aid to rebuild what has been destroyed, makes returning all but impossible.
ISIS families return without reconciliation
While many Yazidis still cannot return home, some former ISIS members are returning to the region. On April 28, a demonstration broke out in Sinjar. Several Arab families who had previously joined ISIS were returned to town by the Iraqi army. A Yazidi woman identified one of them, whose nickname was Haji Ayad, as a member of ISIS who had kidnapped and raped her. In a video, she adds that her father and brother, both kidnapped by ISIS, remain unaccounted for.
Two dozen Yazidis started a demonstration to express their anger, demanding that families who had committed crimes should not be allowed to return to town. But what followed reveals how much hate speech against Yazidis continues in Iraq and beyond. Religious leaders started spreading rumors on social media and in the mass media that Yazidis had attacked and burned down a Sunni Muslim mosque in Sinjar. Video footage dating to a 2014 attack on a mosque in the Iraqi region of Dayala circulated freely on social media, prompting several sheikhs to make fiery sermons during Friday prayers. Yazidis feared that rumors of an attack against a mosque could trigger new acts of violence against their community.
This event illustrates how ISIS families, who lived for several years in camps, are being returned by simple political deals, without a proper process of reconciliation with their former victims.
“Arab Sunnis are still not ready to apologize for what happened to the Yazidis, Christians, Shabaks, and others,” said Dinnayi.
Hassan Jindi Hammo works as a police officer in charge of security at the Qasr Yazdin camp. He himself is a refugee from Tal Banat, also in Sinjar He was serving in the early hours of August 3, 2014, when ISIS attacked.
“We did not expect any attack, we were surprised, we were forced to escape to the mountain,” he recalled. In the massacres that followed, he lost 14 family members, including his father.
“The first two days, those who attacked us were our neighbours, from villages next door,” Hammo explained. “Now those ex-ISIS fighters are returning under the protection of the army. They do not apologise, they are proud of what they did, and then they say they are innocent.”
He added that even now, politicians in Iraq “do not take the genocide against Yazidis seriously.”
Photo by Kristian Skeie.
