Yazidi Genocide

The Yazidi genocide 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 people who are indigenous to Kurdistan who practice Yazidism, a monotheistic Iranian ethnoreligion derived from the Indo-Iranian tradition.

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 was 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.

Amidst 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 had become 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 monotheists who worship Melek Taus, a benevolent angel who appears as a peacock. The self-proclaimed 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; whereas moderate Islam offers these protections to a wide variety of minority religions. The Yazidi community historically recorded their persecution, in which they considered the Qahtaniyah bombings as the 73rd genocide. The persecution by the Islamic State was considered the 74th genocide.

In August 2014, more than 300 Yazidi families were threatened and forced to choose between conversion to Sunni Islam or death.

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 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 Yazidi village of Kojo, south of Sinjar, after the whole population had received the jihadist ultimatum to convert 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