Rape as a Weapon of Genocide and How the UN failed the Yazidi People

Camille
Jul 26, 2021
6 min read

The Yazidis are an endogamous minority group indigenous to the Kurdish region, which include Iraq, Iran, Syria and Turkey. They only practice the Yazidi religion, an ancient monotheistic faith of which only those who were born into the religion can practice it.

In 2014, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (also known as ISIS) carried out a genocidal plan to extinguish them and their faith. Years after the genocide, the consequences are still felt by the remaining Yazidis and the international community have largely turned a blind-eye to them.

Iraqi Yazidi people who fled their homes in Sinjar, enter Iraq from Syria at a border crossing in Feshkhabour in Dohuk Province, northern Iraq, Aug. 10, 2014. ADAM FERGUSON / THE NEW YORK TIMES

The Attack on Yazidis

On the 3rd of August 2014, ISIS fighters swept across the Sinjar Region of northern Iraq, home of the majority of the Yazidi people. The villages and towns of the region were left defenseless as the Iraqi Kurdish forces, the peshmerga, withdrew in face of ISIS’s advances. The men and women who were notified of the attack tried to flee but these attempts were futile as only some would escape. Within a few hours, the Yazidis villages had been captured alongside with its people.

Destroyed and abandonned buildings of the Sinjar region (Source : DW)

ISIS would then split the captured people into 3 categories:

Yazidi men and boys approximately aged 12 and above (presumably passing the age of puberty)
Yazidi women aged 9 and above
Young children and their mothers

For the first group, all those who refuse to renounce Yazidism and convert to Islam had been executed by gunshots to the head, throat slitting, and beheading. Their family members were forced to witness their executions.

Those who have forcibly converted were taken away by the terrorist group and became ISIS captives. They were forced to renounce their Yazidi identities, assimilate into the group and transferred to forced labour sites. However by spring of 2015, ISIS seemed to have determined any conversions of the Yazidi boys and men were false. To this day, little to no information has been found on the whereabouts or the wellbeing of these Yazidis.

Women from Kocho village mourn family members who were among the 3,000 Yazidis killed by ISIS during a 2019 commemoration of the fifth anniversary of the start of the ISIS genocide against Yazidis. ISIS fighters shot more than 500 men and older boys in the small village. (Source: GBP)

The second group was then split into 2 other categories, the married and the unmarried. They would then be transferred to a holding spot where ISIS fighters would choose them to be their slaves.

At the holding spot, the girls and women received little to no food and no medical care. Those who knew of the fate they were heading towards committed suicide before the selection started. Sexual violence was committed at these sites, however it was not done in a massive scale but occurs in a manner that is controlled, authorized and described as respectful to the property rights of the fighters who own the women and girls. Those chosen by a fighter were deemed as his property, termed sabayas or slaves.

Lamiya Aji Bashar, an 18-year-old Yazidi who escaped her Islamic State enslavers, talks to the Associated Press in northern Iraq on May 5.(Balint Szlanko / Associated Press)

After being chosen by a fighter, the women and girls would then be subjected to brutal sexual violence, they were routinely beaten and raped. Girls as young as 9 and pregnant women would not be spared. Some were forced to take birth control, others did not. Attempts to escape would result in brutal beatings, in some instances, gang rape. They would also be sold and aunctioned, passing between fighter to fighter, none of the fighter would ever treat the women and children with humanity. Some girls can be sold as much as more than 7 times.

Other than the inhumane violence they encountered, they were also subjugated to forced labour such as domestic works for the terrorists.

Lamia Haji Bachar (left) et Nadia Murad Basee (right) are both formerly enslaved girls, now laureates of the Sakharov prize

For the last group, the women would be sold alongside her children, where she would encounter the same type of violence that the others had faced. Their children, however, would witness these acts and, in some instances, would be beaten for crying or clinging onto their mothers. Incidents of ISIS fighters killing the children have also been reported.

Once a girl had turned 9, she would be sold. Once the boys had turned 7, they would be transferred to ISIS training camps, where they would be indoctrinated and turned into child soldiers.

The Yazidi child, Milad Hussein, said that IS was insulting them under the pretext of infidelity and calling them "infidels." He pointed out that many Yazidis were trained as suicide bombers and fighting alongside mercenaries under the name of "Jihad." (Source: Hawar News)

Those who have survived bore physical wounds and scars that tell the story of the abuse they’ve encountered. Most of them suffer from extreme PTSD and thoughts of suicide.

According to the United Nations, 5 000 have been killed and 4 200 - 10 800 are still being held captive and kidnapped

How does this constitute a Genocide?

The Convention of Genocide’s defintion includes 2 elements:

A mental element: the "intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such"

A physical element, which includes the following five acts, enumerated exhaustively:
- Killing members of the group
- Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group
- Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part
- Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group
- Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group

The crime would need proof of a special intent to exterminate a certain minority group. ISIS’s mandated abuse of the Yazidis are based on their religious interpretations : the Yazidis, who were deemed to be not “people of the book”, would not be permitted to exist within the group’s plans of the conception of the Islamic State.

A mass funeral is held for Yazidi victims of the Islamic State group, in the northern Iraqi village of Kojo in Sinjar district, Feb. 6, 2021. The remains of 104 Yazidi victims have been returned, six years after IS swept through northern Iraq. (Source :AFP)

The Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic determined that ISIS had sought to exterminate the Yazidis and their faith through mostly non-killing crimes such as “sexual slavery, enslavement, torture and inhuman and degrading treatment and forcible transfer causing serious bodily and mental harm; the infliction of conditions of life that bring about a slow death;”, forced birth control and abortions, and the destruction of Yazidi identities from children by indoctrination.

Rape as a Weapon of War

Although ISIS used many methods to exterminate Yazidism, the most notable act of extermination of Yazidi extermination was extreme sexual violence.

Article 7 and 8 of the Roman Statute indicates rape as a war crime as well as a crime against of humanity. Although rape was not set out as a form of genocide by the corresponding document to the Roman Statute, it regconizes rape as a tool to commit genocide by inflicting serious mental and bodily harm. Sexual violence has long been tools of barbaric extermination of an ethnic group as shown in the Rwandan Genocide,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDniN3k5aQ8

The preplanned institutionalized sexual slavery perpetrated by ISIS was an integral part of the destruction of Yazidi women, their families and their community. The terrorist group’s interpretation of Islamic teaching led them to believe that they were granted the right to rape, and are encourage to do so to those who do not belong in the Muslim faith. The rape of Yazidi women were a tool to “purify” the community from non-Islamic influences and effectively destroy the population. These beliefs would be reinforced by ISIS leadership who tend to manipulate religious doctrines to instrumentalize mass rape and sexual violence

The Yazidi rape survivor confronted the ISIS prisoner before she collapsed on television (Source : The Node)

In the aftermath of the conflict, rape as a tool has worked to cause victims extreme mental and physical harm that would, in many instances, lead to death. The population, especially the women and children are still largely displaced. Furthermore, victims also have told stories of intentional prevention of reproduction. All of these factors combined worked to bring the destruction of the Yazidi population and the Yazidi identities of the victims, constituting rape as a tool used for genocide.

How the UN failed the Yazidis.

2021 marks the 7th year after the genocide, there has been no progress made by the United Nations. Amal Clooney, a human rights lawyer who represents the Yazidis at the UN, have conceived a plan a few years earlier to bring the perpetrators of the genocide to justice. In August 2020, she had renounced UN leaders for their inaction, saying :

“None of the pathways to a court have been studied, pursued, or seriously discussed at the United Nations, or by the Security Council,No conference of foreign ministers has been convened. No government proposals, or counter-proposals, have been put forward and analyzed. No state has offered to host international trials.”

International human rights lawyer Amal Clooney (C) sits with Nadia Murad as she waits to address a ‘Bringing ISIS to Justice’ event at the United Nations headquarters in New York, U.S.REUTERS/LUCAS JACKSON

Any attempts to investigate and document the genocide has proved to be of no effect. The Yazidi genocide seems to have taken the back seat in the UN’s list of priorities while the displacement and kidnappings of Yazidis are still ongoing, most of the victims being women and children. Nadia Murad, a Yazidi activist and sexual slavery survivor, have criticized government leaders for failing to hold ISIS accountable for the genocide and sexual slavery.

“status quo is destroying our community” and international inaction is enabling the extremist group to “accomplish their goal of eradicating the Yazidis from Iraq”