Yezidis Status as a Targeted Group

Genocide can only be committed against specific protected groups, namely: national, ethnic, racial, or religious groups. Yezidis qualify as a religious or an ethno-religious group.

Yezidis’ identity as a distinct religious group is unambiguous. The Yezidi faith—one indigenous to the region—has existed for thousands of years, adapting elements of later faiths including Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Yezidis consider themselves a distinct religious faith; ISIS also viewed Yezidis as a distinct faith and targeted them based on their religious beliefs.

The Genocide Convention defines ethnic groups as those “whose members share a common language or culture.” However, there is debate over whether Yezidis, who speak Kurdish dialects, are a distinct ethnic group rather than Kurdish. Although widely considered a religious minority within the Kurdish ethnic group, many Yezidis do not consider themselves Kurdish.

Whether considered an ethno-religious or simply a religious group, the Yezidis are clearly a group identified by and protected under the Genocide Convention.

Required Intent

For any of the listed acts to be considered genocidal—even mass killings—they must be committed with a specific genocidal intentto cause the destruction, in whole or in part, of a protected group.[4]

Usually, determining genocidal intent is a challenging exercise; perpetrators may try to conceal their motives which must be inferred from some combination of statements and actions; ISIS, however, expressly stated their intent to destroy the Yezidi people.

Two months after their attack on Sinjar, ISIS published an article called “The Revival of Slavery Before the Hour” in its English language magazine, Dabiq, that stated: “Their [Yezidis] continual existence to this day is a matter that Muslims should question as they will be asked about it on Judgment Day.”[5]

The article showed the extent of ISIS’s planning for their attack on the Yezidis, explaining how—prior to taking Sinjar—ISIS’s Shariah students researched how people of the Yezidi faith should be treated. The article explained that unlike Jews or Christians, Yezidis would not be permitted to make a jizyah payment, a taxlike payment for non-Muslim religions of the book to remain in the Caliphate. These students further determined that Yezidi women—unlike Jews, Christians, or Shia Muslims—could be enslaved.

In addition to extensive internal and external documentation of ISIS’s specific intent, the group’s conduct is extremely consistent with an attempt to destroy the Yezidi people. ISIS leaders undertook a massive organisational effort to ensure fighters precisely implemented their plans across Sinjar, transferring thousands of Yezidi captives to clearly pre-designated holding sites, separating out older boys and men for forced conversion or execution, and immediately implementing a complex system for registering and selling Yezidi women and children.

ISIS’s intent to destroy the Yezidis is further evinced by the group’s hyper focus on the Yezidis rather than other groups as they seized control of Sinjar.

There is no gray area. ISIS deliberately planned to destroy the Yezidi people because of their identity as Yezidi people; they clearly possessed the specific intent required to commit genocide.

Prohibited Conduct

ISIS committed crimes in every category of prohibited conduct in their genocide against the Yezidi people. These crimes are summarised here in the order they are listed in the Genocide Convention.

a)     Killing Members of the Group: Mass Executions and Individual Killings

ISIS intentionally killed over 3,000 Yezidis in their initial assault on Sinjar.[6] ISIS fighters executed hundreds of Yezidis men and boy Yezidis who refused to convert to Islam. There is extensive documentation of these killings, including from ISIS’s own statements and documentation. According to statistics from the Kidnapped Yazidis Rescue Office, there are 83 mass graves of Yezidis across Sinjar in addition to tens of individual graves.[7]

In their siege of the Yezidis on Mount Sinjar, ISIS deliberately caused thousands more deaths of Yezidis deprived of food, water, and emergency medical assistance.

ISIS singled out Yezidis based on their religious faith and killed them; these crimes clearly can be recognised as acts of genocide.

b)     Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group

ISIS deliberately caused serious bodily and mental harm to Yezidi men, women, and children. ISIS subjected Yezidis to sexual violence, systematic slavery—both sexual slavery and other forced labour, beatings and other brutal physical and psychological mistreatment.

Rape and Sexual Slavery

Rape and sexual violence can qualify as both serious physical and serious mental harm—and if carried out with requisite intent—can constitute genocide.[8] Sexual enslavement Is a crime in itself beyond rape; under the Rome Statute, sexual enslavement is a crime against humanity.

ISIS systematically planned and enacted the rape and sexual enslavement of Yezidi women and girls with the intent to humiliate and destroy the Yezidi people. According to ISIS’s interpretation of Islam, 80 percent of Yezidi girls and young women were sold to individual ISIS members as property; men could re-sell, gift, or will them to other ISIS fighters as they chose. Another 20 percent were kept as ‘collective property’ and held at military bases. In the course of sexual enslavement, Yezidi women and girls would be raped dozens, even hundreds of times, often by multiple perpetrators.

Enslavement

Enslavement—separate from sexual enslavement—is also a crime against humanity according to the Rome Statute. ISIS enslaved Yezidi men, women, and children.

In addition to sexual enslavement, Yezidi women and girls were forced to do domestic labour for ISIS fighters and their families. Yezidi men and boys were also forced to do various labour, doing construction, looking after livestock, digging trenches, and cleaning in Tal Afar and Mosul—thus held as slaves. ISIS threatened and severely beat men, women, and children who refused tasks.

Torture and inhuman and degrading treatment

Other physical and psychological mistreatment belies categories. Upon capture, ISIS separated Yezidi men and older boys from women and children, rending families in half and leaving some women and children forever uncertain what happened to their male relatives. Others endured the psychological trauma of bearing witness to the mass executions that followed. ISIS then split women, girls, and young boys from their family members.

Yezidi women and girls lived as chattel under ISIS and faced deprivation of liberty in every aspect of their lives with untold psychological harm; an unknown number of women and girls ended or attempted to end their own lives. This brutal sexual violence bore a massive physical and psychological toll now endured by Yezidi survivors.

The youngest Yezidi children were permitted to stay with their mothers during their enslavement but experienced the loss and separation from their fathers and older siblings.  They were also aware of the ongoing sexual violence inflicted on their mothers and frequently threatened, beaten, and otherwise mistreated.

ISIS further inflicted serious mental and physical harm on young Yezidi boys who endured the traumatic separation from their families and were forced to convert and taken to indoctrination camps for military training: boys were beaten, trained for suicide bombing, and forced to watch violent war propaganda in addition to being forced to participate in hostilities, often as suicide bombers. ISIS used such abuse to destroy the boys’ identity as Yezidis.

Throughout Yezidis’ experience in captivity, there was deprivation of food and water and frequent threats, insults, and degradation. Any resistance to ISIS was met with beatings and mistreatment; ISIS cracked down upon escape attempts with punishments ranging from gang rape and serious bodily harm to execution.

As the above sections make clear, there is no question that ISIS caused serious bodily and mental harm to Yezidis qualifying as genocidal conduct. The summary provided here is far from comprehensive accounting of such instances of physical and psychological harm that ISIS perpetuated against Yezidis.

a)     Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

Conditions of life calculated to bring about physical destruction of a group can include “deliberate deprivation of resources indispensable for survival” or systematic expulsion from homes.[9] ISIS besieged tens of thousands of Yezidis who had sought refuge on Mount Sinjar, cutting Yezidis off from food, water, and medical care. ISIS attacked planes dropping supplies and helicopters attempting medical rescues.

Rape can also qualify as conduct which does not “lead immediately to the death of members of the group” but is calculated to bring about the group’s destruction.[10] ISIS conduct—subjecting women and girls to systematic rapes by ISIS fighters while restricting food, water, and medical care and inflicting beatings for failure to obey orders—caused deaths of Yezidi women and children.

ISIS’s brutal treatment of both Yezidis they besieged and Yezidis they captured both qualify as conditions of life calculated to bring about the Yezidis’ destruction.

a)     Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group

ISIS imposed a wide number of measures intended to prevent Yezidi births. Most simply, ISIS’s first act upon capturing Yezidis was to separate women from men and to kill hundreds of Yezidi men. Except for the small group of captive Yezidi men whom ISIS deemed had converted to Islam and permitted to reunite with their wives (and then forced into slave labour), Yezidi men and women were kept apart.

Such separation is of the utmost significance because in the Yezidi faith, both the father and mother must be Yezidi for their child to be Yezidi. There is no possibility to convert to the Yezidi religion. By the simple act of separating Yezidi men from women, ISIS deliberately imposed a condition to prevent births within the group.

Less directly, rape and sexual assault can prevent birth when a survivor of rape or sexual assault subsequently refuses to procreate.[11] Many Yezidi women and girls who have suffered repeated sexual violence suffer from lasting fear of contact with men and disinterest in future sexual relationships. This is an expected consequence of such severe trauma and one that limits romantic relationships for Yezidi survivors. Concern and shame over ‘lost honour’ compound this trauma.

ISIS knowingly and deliberately imposed direct and indirect measures to prevent births of new Yezidi children.

b)     Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group

ISIS forcibly transferred Yezidi boy and girl children away from their families. At nine years old, ISIS took girls from their mothers and sold them to ISIS fighters. Yezidi boys were taken from their mothers at the age of seven, sent to ISIS training camps, indoctrinated into ISIS beliefs, and trained as child soldiers. Some Yezidi children lost all notion of their identity, forgetting their family members, and becoming indoctrinated into ISIS’s warped belief system. Other children—forced to fight on the frontlines—lost their lives.

ISIS’s methodical taking of Yezidi children—girls as sex slaves and boys as child recruits—clearly qualifies as forcible transfer of children.

Conclusion

In their effort to destroy the Yezidi people, ISIS perpetrated conduct in every category listed by the Genocide Convention. Although ISIS no longer controls territory in Iraq and Syria, the effects of genocide persist. Suicides within the Yezidi community are on the rise. Families exist in remnants, the fates of their loved ones yet unknown. Those who do return face brutal challenges to heal and reintegrate; some children return believing the ideology of their captors. No Yezidi has been spared this collective trauma. For too many Yezidis, justice remains elusive. The first step towards any reckoning must be calling these crimes what they are: genocide.

[4] Prosecutor v. Rutaganda, ICTR Trial Judgment, 6 Dec. 1999 (“Rutaganda Trial Judgment”), para. 60.
[5] The Failed Crusade, “The Revival of Slavery Before the Hour”, Dabiq, 11 October 2014.
[6] Valeria Cetorelli, Isaac Sasson, Nazar Shabila, Gilbert Burnham, “Mortality and kidnapping estimates for the Yazidi population in the area of Mount Sinjar, Iraq, in August 2014: A retrospective household survey”, PLOS Medicine, 9 May 2017,  https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.1002297.
[7]  احصائية رسمية جديدة عن ضحايا الايزيديين على يد تنظيم داعش بالعراق, Shafaq News, 2 September 2019, https://rb.gy/gvggtg.
[8] Prosecutor v. Akayesu, ICTR Trial Judgment, 2 September 1998 (“Akayesu Trial Judgement”), para. 502.
[9] Footnote 4, Article 6(c) of the Rome Statute.
[10] Prosecutor v. Kayishema et al., ICTR Trial Judgment, 21 May 1999 (“Kayishema Trial Judgment”) para. 116.
[11] Akayesu Trial Judgment, para. 508.