Yazidis’ Long and Winding Road to Justice

Nawaf Haskan is a poet. His poem “Five Sisters” appeared in the Spring 2016 issue of Iowa Review:

Over there, in that sleeping town,
beyond those hills that lay down,
five sisters hurried to the naked mountain.

The poem goes on to explain that the sisters, fleeing for safety, never reached their destination, but were “grabbed from the arms of their family to face the guns’ muzzles.” The witnesses of their violent deaths were God, the “stunned moon,” and “the salty warm dark soil.” But “no one saved them,” Haskan writes. “None dared prevent it.”

The women, like Haskan, were Yazidis, members of a small ethnoreligious group whose traditional lands sprawl across what is today Syria, Turkey, and northwestern Iraq. Yazidis have been the target of discrimination and violence from potentates as well as from their own neighbors for centuries. Haskan’s poem is based on a Yazidi woman he knew. She helped her five sisters and partially paralyzed father into the bed of a truck as they tried to flee the advancing campaign of slaughter and enslavement against Yazidis that the Islamic State, or ISIS, began 10 years ago this month, on Aug. 3, 2014. The group besieged many of those who fled successfully for nearly two weeks atop Mount Sinjar, sacred in Yazidism, where still more succumbed to hunger and thirst. Today, Haskan suffers from depression and post-traumatic stress disorder from the psychological damage of watching from a distance as his own family fled ISIS.

Like thousands of other Yazidi Americans, he is also a Cornhusker, having settled in Nebraska after immigrating to the United States in 2016 and spending an initial stint in Washington, D.C., advocating for his community back home. He chatted with me on the phone one weekday afternoon from Lincoln, a decade after the genocide of his people that saw his own family farm destroyed. In the background, I heard the familiar suburban dad noises of the “door ajar” car ding and children’s voices over the rumble of the road. Before immigrating, Haskan had been to the United States one time, in 2012, when he had traveled as a university student with his Shakespeare club to perform at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Coming from Iraq that summer, he recalled, once he experienced the cool San Francisco rain and the slick elegance on display during a tour of the Google campus, he knew he wanted to move to the U.S. It wasn’t just the topography that attracted him, though. Before college, he was an interpreter for the U.S. Army, where he had been impressed by the diversity of the soldiers he met. They weren’t the stereotypical meatheads from the Rambo films he was able to catch growing up in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. “I saw how diverse the army was,” Haskan said. Suddenly he had Black and Asian American friends, people from all different backgrounds. “That was changing for me,” he said.

The former director of the Yazidi Cultural Center in Lincoln, Nebraska, Haskan is one of over 800 Yazidi Americans filing a civil lawsuit against Lafarge, a French cement company that pled guilty in a U.S. criminal trial in 2022 to financially aiding ISIS during its 2014 reign of terror. Alongside the law firm Jenner & Block, high-profile international human rights lawyer Amal Clooney has joined the effort to obtain reparations from Lafarge for these Yazidi survivors. Scattered throughout the country, with a heavy concentration in Nebraska, Yazidi Americans are anxious that their community is not forgotten by the Iraqi government, the international community, or by their adopted American government.

The Kurdish-speaking Yazidis do not fit neatly into any of the religious categories that Americans typically associate with the Middle East. Their religion is a combination of Abrahamic beliefs and Zoroastrianism. Yazidi belief contends that the Yazidi people are directly descended from Adam, the first man. However, one scholarly theory traces their origins to the 12th century CE and the Umayyad caliphate, when a dynastic descendent settled in Kurdistan, and a strain of Sufi mysticism blended with pre-Islamic local tradition. Yazidis practice a monotheistic faith that reveres seven angels who serve as God’s key surrogates. Chief among the angels is Malek Taūs, said to have transformed into a peacock after falling to earth from heaven. The so-called Peacock Angel has proven a particularly problematic divine intermediary for the Yazidis, since Lucifer is also believed by Muslims and Christians to have fallen from heaven. This conflation of Malek Taūs with the most famous fallen angel in the Abrahamic tradition has led to a popular characterization of Yazidis as devil-worshippers.

Yazidis’ spiritual and cultural capital is Iraq’s Sinjar region, at the base of Sinjar Mountain, a sacred site to Yazidis—around half a million of whom lived in some 50 villages prior to 2014. Jenner & Block’s lawsuit, filed against Lafarge in December 2023, provides a sketch of traditional Yazidi life: “Many made a living by farming or shepherding sheep and goats,” it states. “Yazidi families are typically large and tight-knit. Families lived in the same house even as their children grew up and started families of their own. Extended families usually lived on the same street and often in joint compounds, sharing meals, resources, and income.” The day before the attack had been a Yazidi summer festival, Çileya Havînê, marking 40 days of summer with music, family visits, eating, and drinking.

Not far from the ancient Silk Road, the region remains an economic and cultural crossroads today. The area’s continuing strategic value contributed to the Islamic State’s motive for the violent havoc it visited upon Yazidi men, women, and children 10 years ago—along with old ethnic and religious hatreds. Although ISIS had been around in nascent form since 2004, it made its presence felt in Iraq with attacks on Mosul and Tikrit in June 2014, around the time it declared itself a caliphate. By August 2014, ISIS was expanding to neighboring Kurdish-held areas of Iraq. Devil-worshipping allegations connected to the Peacock Angel—peacocks remain a popular motif for Yazidi homes, as well as religious and cultural sites—featured prominently in ISIS’ rationale for targeting Yazidis.

“Can Satanists be enslaved?” an October 2014 Brookings article began. It was a question that Islamic State scholars posed and answered affirmatively ahead of the group’s assault on Sinjar. Yazidis were mushriks (polytheists) who were not mentioned in the Quran, and therefore not protected under Islamic law, they reasoned. Christians and Jews—People of the Book—worshipped the same God as Muslims, and so under ISIS they had the option to convert, flee, or pay the jizya tax, an ancient Islamic practice that extended legal protection to conquered religious groups. The devil-worshipping Yazidis could be offered no such option, ISIS scholars determined, and so faced either slaughter or enslavement.

A contemporaneous 2014 article in ISIS’ print magazine made clear that reviving the practice of enslavement was in fact a key part of the caliphate’s apocalyptic mission. Citing a saying attributed to the Prophet Muhammad and to a prophecy, both of which dealt with the Day of Judgment and included mentions of slavery, the author explained that enslavement must therefore be a precondition for their eschatological fulfillment. According to the court documents in the Lafarge case: “ISIS singled out the Yazidis as the group they wished to destroy.”

But Yazidis had been the target of pogroms and ethnic cleansing attempts before. The first attempts date back centuries, during which Yazidis were targeted both by the Ottoman Empire and surrounding Kurds. A Lapham’s Quarterly article by Alex Cuadros, “Songs from Sinjar,” explains how Yazidism’s stories, rituals, and beliefs were transmitted orally, with no sacred texts, which some scholars speculate may have been in part a protective measure against hostile outsiders—as was basing themselves in the mountains. Professional bards, or qewwals, memorize sacred songs, and transmit stories and teachings to the Yazidi people via spoken segments called chiroks.

In the 1970s, two young men persuaded Yazidi’s guiding spiritual authority, the Baba Sheikh, to permit the sacred songs to be recorded. The timing would prove to be serendipitous. It was in the 1970s, under Saddam Hussein, that a forced campaign of Arabization led to the creation of the town of Sinjar, when the regime made Yazidis leave their traditional mountain towns to occupy the new city. Because of the caste-bound nature of Yazidi society, which forbids writing to all but one priestly family, when it comes to getting to the specifics of Yazidi belief and history, “part of the problem in pinning down the details,” Cuadros wrote, “was that the Yazidis themselves often did not know the answers.” According to Cuadros, Yazidi prayer is private, weekly worship is not a feature of Yazidism, and religious instruction typically has taken place via visiting qewwals or at religious festivals. Qewwals were already dwindling in number prior to 2014, he wrote, and the continuation of this tradition is in jeopardy in the wake of the ferman, as Yazidis call it, the genocide.

But even after Yazidis departed their historic mountain dwellings, Mount Sinjar remained an important spiritual site. The mountain, with a peak elevation of nearly 4,500 feet, enfolds numerous shrines and holy sites. These shrines are notable for their unique architecture, characterized by cube shapes with conical spires sitting atop discs. At Mount Sinjar’s peak is one of Yazidism’s holiest sites, the Sharfadin Shrine. Sharfadin is sometimes called a Yazidi “saint,” a 13th-century figure who defended his people against both Muslim and Mongol conquest. While ISIS destroyed many sacred sites in and around Mount Sinjar in 2014, 18 Yazidi militia men held out for four months to successfully protect the 800-year-old temple.

Responsibility for the administration of the Yazidis’ traditional lands is an ongoing source of dispute between the semi-autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) and the government of Iraq. Around 400,000 Yazidis fled as ISIS advanced on their towns in northern Iraq, in an area nominally administered by Baghdad, but disputed by the KRG. Nearby Mosul had fallen to the Islamic State in June, and it was clear they weren’t going to stop there. “It seemed that IS sought to create a passageway between Mosul and Raqqa,” Naomi Kikoler wrote in a 2015 Simon-Skjodt Center for the Prevention of Genocide report, which meant seizing the cities of Tal Afar and Sinjar—both with significant Yazidi populations—en route to Syria.

Islamic State fighters were able to proceed largely unchallenged, as the peshmerga fighters, the security forces aligned with the KRG and the governing Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP), had already withdrawn from Yazidi communities in advance. There are allegations that in some places, peshmerga actually disarmed Yazidis before fleeing (just why this happened is a subject of some controversy). According to a 2016 report issued by the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, it was when word got out that the peshmerga had abandoned their checkpoints that panic began to build, and Yazidis fled their homes and towns.

Once Islamic State fighters overtook towns, they established checkpoints that kept in place Yazidis who had been unable to flee. “By the time ISIS entered Sinjar,” according to the U.N. report, which is based on interviews with 45 witnesses, “there were few military objectives in the region. ISIS fighters focused their attention on capturing Yazidis.”

Men and boys, women and girls were separated by sex. The details in the U.N. report recount horrific details of violence, torture, and killing perpetrated by ISIS fighters against Yazidi men, women, and children.

“After we were captured, ISIS forced us to watch them beheading some of our Yazidi men,” according to a girl quoted in the U.N. report (she is described as “Girl, aged 16 at capture, held for 7 months, sold once.”) “They made the men kneel in a line in the street, with their hands tied behind their backs. The ISIS fighters took knives and cut their throats.” A woman who was held by ISIS for 15 months and sold five times described the last time she saw her husband: “ISIS ordered everyone from Kocho to go to the school. Men and boys over 10 years were on the ground floor, while women and children were on the upper floor. The fighters took the men and boys away. After ISIS took them, no men from the village ever returned.”

Survivors were made to convert to Islam, the report states, and transferred to other sites where they were subject to forced labor. The first escape attempt was punished with beatings, the second was a capital offense. Families of successful and attempted escapees were punished and sometimes killed.

Women and girls were separated by age and marital status. Unmarried girls and women were transferred to other places throughout Iraq and Syria and sold into sex slavery. One woman’s account recalls seeing a girl who appeared to be as young as 9 taken.

“From the moment that Yazidi women and girls entered the holding sites, ISIS fighters came into the rooms where they were held in order to select women and girls they wished to take with them. Interviewees described feelings of abject terror on hearing footsteps in the corridor outside and keys opening the locks. Women and girls scrambled to the corners of the rooms, mothers hiding their daughters,” reads the U.N. report. “The selection of any girl was accompanied by screaming as she was forcibly pulled from the room, with her mother and any other women who tried to keep hold of her being brutally beaten by fighters.”

The U.N. High Commission report states that while 80% of women and girls were given over to IS fighters for individual sale, around 20% remained at Islamic State holding sites and were held as common property. Around 2,700 Yazidi women and girls remain missing as of this writing.

For the Yazidis who fled their villages for sacred Mount Sinjar, a different brutal reality awaited them. Encircled below by Islamic State fighters, the thousands who had made it to the mountain were trapped without food or water in the middle of summer. Hundreds, including infants and children, ultimately died of thirst and starvation. By Aug. 7, President Barack Obama had ordered humanitarian aid air drops and air strikes on Islamic State positions. Within a week of the initial Islamic State onslaught, Kurdish militias—including the PKK, a Marxist Kurdish separatist force labeled a terrorist group by both the United States and Turkey—established a secure corridor for Yazidis to safely come down from Mount Sinjar in the ensuing days, and to find their way to refugee camps. Some 200,000 Yazidis remain in camps today.

Abid Shamdeen served as an interpreter for the United States military in Tal Afar, Iraq. When Shamdeen, a Yazidi American, saw the news about the death and destruction being inflicted on his community, he said the “natural reaction” was to want to help.

Many Yazidi Americans living in the United States live in Nebraska and Texas. “After the Iraq-Iran war,” Shamdeen said, “they relocated some [Yazidi] families,” especially to Nebraska, where Shamdeen himself got his undergraduate degree after serving as a U.S. Army interpreter. A minor chain reaction followed throughout the 1990s, and again after the outbreak of the Iraq war in 2003. “One family heard that there’s a group of Yazidi families there, and the others went,” he said. “It was important to have that sense of community.” Today, Lincoln, Nebraska, is home to an estimated 3,000 to 4,000 Yazidis. It is the site of the Yazidi Cultural Center, and the headquarters for Yazda, the international Yazidi advocacy organization. On its outskirts sits a Yazidi cemetery, which allows Yazidis to observe their own funerary traditions, rather than send deceased family members back to Iraq for burial, as they had previously done.

Together with Nadia Murad—a Yazidi survivor of ISIS enslavement and a Nobel Prize recipient—Shamdeen is a co-founder of Nadia’s Initiative, a nonprofit dedicated to advancing Yazidi causes in Iraq and across the diaspora, as well as to preventing systemic violence against women and girls. At the forefront of Murad’s legal efforts is the initiative to extract justice from Lafarge.

In October 2022, Lafarge and its Syrian subsidiary pled guilty in the Justice Department’s first prosecution of corporate material assistance to a terrorist organization, and agreed to pay $778 million in criminal fines and forfeiture to the U.S. government. According to the court documents filed by the DOJ, company executives in Paris began directing the Jalabiyeh cement plant to pay protection money to ISIS to continue operating in Syria in 2013. On Aug. 4, 2014, even as ISIS descended upon Yazidi civilians in Iraq, Lafarge was negotiating with the terrorist group through intermediaries. When Lafarge finally evacuated its Syrian factory in September 2014, ISIS sold the cement themselves.

Lafarge kickback payments were funneled to ISIS’ capital of Raqqa, Syria, where the group planned and trained fighters, and where enslaved Yazidis were brought after the attack in Sinjar. According to the complaint filed against Lafarge by Jenner & Block in December 2023, it was Raqqa to which Yazidi women were “forcibly transported” from Sinjar, and were gathered, registered, and photographed in holding sites and underground prisons, before being sold into slavery. Based on accounts, the complaint also alleges that ISIS used Lafarge cement to build the network of underground tunnels in both Syria and Iraq that were crucial to their operations. Since Lafarge used U.S.-based email accounts to conduct their correspondence with the terror group, and funneled dollar transactions through U.S. banks, the U.S. Department of Justice was able to bring a suit against Lafarge for aiding terrorism.

But the fines resulting from the DOJ prosecution were paid to the U.S. Treasury. What Nadia Murad seeks, together with hundreds of other Yazidi Americans, is some tangible justice for ISIS’ Yazidi victims themselves—something that has been very difficult to obtain, either in Iraq or across the diaspora. The complaint filed by Clooney, with Jenner & Block, requests a trial by jury for Lafarge for violations of the U.S. Anti-Terrorism Act.

Yazda hosted Amal Clooney during a visit to Lincoln in May of last year to meet with Yazidi survivors of Sinjar. “We didn’t tell them what it was about,” Clooney said to Fareed Zakaria in a CNN interview about the Lafarge case filing in December. “We said, ‘Can you please gather in this hall at this time? This lawyer’s coming to Lincoln.’”

“At the beginning there was not too much buzz,” Haskan told me, but people went to the advertised venue to find out the nature of the visit. Clooney said she explained to the attendees that the Lafarge lawsuit was a “meaningful” opportunity to obtain some justice for Yazidi survivors. Haskan said word trickled out throughout the community, one after another. “People started coming and filling the hall,” Clooney said. “And I extended the trip.”

Together with Murad, some 400 Yazidi Americans ended up filing as plaintiffs, and an additional 442 plaintiffs joined in August of this year as word of the case spread. “When ISIS attacked Sinjar, my family was killed, and I was taken captive as a slave,” Murad said in a statement to Tablet. “I was exploited and assaulted every single day. After my escape, I wanted to raise awareness of the atrocities that Yazidis faced and hold the responsible parties accountable for their crimes. Knowing that Lafarge admitted to supporting ISIS during the time of the attack on my community, I am beyond disappointed and angry—because as victims of these crimes, there has been no justice or recompense for us. When I learned about the lawsuit, which was being filed on behalf of Yazidi-Americans against Lafarge, I knew I wanted to participate. I am hopeful that Lafarge will answer for its part in the genocide and grateful to the legal team for bringing forward this case.”

In Haskan’s mind, the payout isn’t merely symbolic for the Yazidis he knows. He was present as a volunteer interpreter during Clooney’s visit last year. As a result, he gets stopped frequently, “in the street or in the store,” by people wanting to know, he said with a laugh, “when they will pay us.”

“I think the payment is a big part of it,” he said of the lawsuit. Plaintiffs hope to send the money to family still in Iraq, Haskan said, or to finance the development of a pro-Yazidi lobby in Washington, D.C. This latter part is especially important according to Haskan, who views government and political turnover as part of the difficulty in getting lawmakers to give adequate attention to the needs of their friends and family since 2014.

As a former military translator, Haskan was able to come to the United States on a Special Immigrant Visa. But other Yazidi refugees learned early on that getting anyone to take notice can be expensive and all-consuming.

Initially in the wake of ISIS’ destruction in Sinjar, Haskan said, “We just said OK, people we see that we are killed, they will just allow us to go to their country. But that wasn’t the case.” Rather, they learned that to get to the United States, “it takes a lot of advocacy,” he said. “You know, networking, communication,” and sometimes, in the case of getting legislation passed, money. He recalls getting involved in advocacy in Washington, D.C., after his arrival in 2016, and being surprised at the amount of effort and work it took to get desired legislation passed.

Sympathetic lawmakers and embassy staff inevitably reach the end of their terms. “Those people disappear,” Haskan said, and their replacements, often tabula rasas on the issues surrounding the Yazidi community, need to be brought up to speed. “You have to constantly advocate for your goals.”

This latest lawsuit against Lafarge is also a leap of faith for some plaintiffs. Haskan said there are hopes that winning this case could set off a chain reaction where other countries and courts hold organizations and even governments accountable for their complicity in ISIS’ actions.

At a July 30, 2024, panel at the Wilson Center, Yazidi activists provided examples of the obstacles to accountability that Yazidis face both at home in Iraq and elsewhere. A few cases against ISIS members have been prosecuted in Germany. The French Supreme Court ruled in January that Lafarge can be charged with complicity in carrying out crimes against humanity. The payout, however, will be “symbolic,” according to Free Yazidi Foundation founder Pari Ibrahim. In Iraq, Yazidis face difficulty in procuring reparations from the Iraqi government due to layers of onerous bureaucracy, a lack of clear responsibility for Sinjar between the Iraqi government and the KRG, and an apparent continued anti-Yazidi bias in Iraq. Sinjar Academy Director Murad Ismail asserted at the Wilson Center panel that many Yazidi compensation claims under the law languish unprocessed, a claim that seems to be supported by a 2023 Human Rights Watch report. While the United Arab Emirates is teaming up with UNESCO and the European Union to rebuild historic and cultural sites in nearby Mosul, efforts to rebuild Sinjar lag behind, and are largely dependent on independent nonprofit organizations like Nadia’s Initiative, Sinjar Academy, and Yazda. “You go to Mosul, which is now trying to be the next Dubai,” said Ismail during the panel. “Just like, a few kilometers from mass graves that they don’t pay money to exhume.” Ibrahim said that many Yazidis still living in camps are anxious to leave for the United States, Canada, and Europe. “If I sat here,” she said to the panelists, “and I know that over half of you does not want to eat any food that we would prepare, how can we live in the same society?” Reconstruction work, collecting testimonies, and care for Yazidis remaining in the refugee camps often falls to NGOs like Nadia’s Initiative.

Further frustrating Yazidis’ struggle for justice is the Iraqi government’s decision to end the United Nations Investigative Team to Promote Accountability for Crimes Committed by Daesh (UNITAD) in March of this year. Established in 2017 to help bring the Islamic State to justice, it was always a difficult project, due to the scope of the investigation, as well as a misalignment of Iraqi government and U.N. aims and policy over prosecuting and punishing Islamic State members. For most Yazidis in Iraq and across the diaspora, however, there is frustration and disappointment over the lack of clarity over what will happen to the evidence collected to date.

Moreover, many Yazidis are reluctant to return home due to an unstable security environment. A patchwork of militias with various regional alliances operate in the Kurdish region of Iraq today, including the PKK, which uses Sinjar as a base to launch operations into Turkey (and vice versa). The Iran-aligned and Iraqi-government supported Popular Mobility Forces (PMF) are also operational in Sinjar, attracting young Yazidis facing few job opportunities. Both groups use the region as a nexus to supply their respective interests: supporting the Assad regime in Syria and Hezbollah in Lebanon in the case of the PMF, and for the PKK, running arms from allied groups in Turkey and Syria in their struggle against the Turkish government. In addition to backing PMF operations in their country, the Iraqi government is working multiple angles with its neighbors to establish itself as a dynamic regional power broker. Notably, they are aligning with Turkey, the UAE, and Qatar to establish a road and rail initiative that will make Iraq a transportation nerve center for the Middle East and Europe.

The United States military maintains a presence in the Kurdistan Regional Government capital of Irbil, but Iraq wants the U.S. to pull out of Iraq beginning in September of this year. Talks are underway for the move, which U.S. security experts warn would only suit Iranian interests. U.S. withdrawal, it is argued, would harm not only Yazidi but regional security as ISIS appears to be ramping up attacks—it executed 153 attacks in Iraq and Syria between January and June 2024, a rate that if continued, is set to double their total attacks in 2023. “Iran believes it has the momentum to force a premature withdrawal of the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS,” U.S. Central Command commander Gen. Erik Kurilla said in March 2024 congressional testimony. He warned that doing so, however, would allow the Islamic State to “reconstitute the ability to seize territory within two years.” Accomplishing this would give ISIS time and space to plan attacks around the world, Kurilla said.

In that sense, Yazidi security is global security, and the surest way to obtain justice for survivors of the 2014 assault may be to ensure that the group who killed thousands of their men, women, and children is not allowed to regroup. “Many of us believe if the U.S. Army was [in Sinjar],” said Haskan, “that genocide wouldn’t happen.” It is a phenomenon he said he witnessed as a translator for the U.S. military, in 2004 and in 2007, times when United States military operations defeated al-Qaida in Tal Afar and later in Anbar province. (Full disclosure: My father commanded the 1st Brigade, 1st Armored Division in Ramadi, Iraq, during this time, and took command of the U.S. fight against ISIS, Operation Inherent Resolve, in 2015.) “They were so close to [taking over] Sinjar,” Haskan said, but the U.S. military “wiped [al-Qaida] out.” The earlier U.S. withdrawal at the end of 2011 was already difficult enough for minorities in Iraq, he said. The smaller the international presence in Iraq, said Haskan, “the worse for the minorities, especially the Yazidis, because the government doesn’t listen to them.”

A more immediate form of justice, Shamdeen said, is the recovery of the approximately 2,700 women and girls who remain missing after being taken captive by ISIS.

Yazidis in Sinjar continue to be caught in the middle of several tensions—between the KRG and Iraq, between Iran and the United States, between Turkey and the PKK. To commemorate 10 years since the genocide, Yazidi advocacy groups have issued status reports on the Yazidi diaspora. The reports include recommendations for the international community on ways to provide economic, educational, and physical security for Yazidis in Sinjar. These plans require the involvement of various organizations and national governments. What remains to be seen is whether anyone is paying attention.