Scars on the body. Scars on the soul. Let’s not be silent!
Martin Bandžák | Tero Abaffy
16/6 - 3/9/2023
In the summer of 2014, ISIS embarked on a campaign of genocide in northern Iraq's Sinjar region, intent on killing, capturing and forcibly converting members of the ancient religion they considered infidels. Thousands of women were taken into sexual slavery, young boys turned to be soldiers.
Seven years later, almost 200,000 Yazidis — nearly half of Sinjar's population before the genocide — are still living in displacement camps in Iraq's Kurdistan Region, either too traumatized or too poor to return.
“I once thought I’d die only once in my life. I died every hour on the day a new Daesh soldier came for me.” Leila
One cannot become Yazidi. One can only be born Yazidi. Before the war with ISIS, there were about a million Yazidis in the entire world, the largest group living in northwest Iraq near the Sinjar Mountains. This hundred kilometers range, running almost directly east to west and with a steep northern side and gentler southern slopes, stands out from the plain visible from every village around. For Yazidis it has been a sacred place for centuries. Not only is it sacred, but for almost a thousand years the mountains have always provided refuge – whether from tribal attacks in the distant past, when early Muslim chieftains regarded Yazidis as infidel devil‑worshippers; or later during war with the ruthless Ottoman Empire, whose warriors massacred hundreds at once, sacking villages and forcing the Yazidis to accept Islam; or in the 1970s when many Yazidis joined the Kurdish resistance and the dictator Saddam Hussein responded by levelling their villages and displacing the survivors to bleak places built by the state.
Again in August 2014 tens of thousands of Yazidis fled across the plain to hills around Mount Sinjar, only for Islamic State radicals to surround them on all sides. There followed scorching days, freezing nights, hunger, and thirst. The only assistance they received came from the air, by helicopter. And they had to face all this in the knowledge that many of their families would not survive.
“I was born in 2007 in the village of Tal Uzair in northwestern Iraq. When they arrived I was in my sixth year of school. That terrible day, they murdered seven members of my family in front of my eyes. That day they killed or wounded 32 of my relatives. They wanted to kill the children, girls and women too, but one of the murderers contacted the emir, who told them not to kill us. They took us to the police station, where we saw many dead bodies and smelled the stench of their decay. We watched them kill three women and a man in front of the police station.” Lamya
Within a few days all the Yazidi villages were abandoned, the inhabitants murdered, captured or in flight. Over 350 thousand were forced to flee. Even now it’s unclear how many lost their lives. There is talk of over five thousand murdered. As of now some 70 mass graves have been discovered.
The stories of how premeditated their suffering was, how thoroughly the Islamic State fighters went about eliminating the Yazidis are not easy to hear. It’s incomprehensible how the world simply watched without intervening, never giving Yazidis much attention. Face to face with these people who survived a genocide, and after seeing these photographs, we have to admit that to ignore evil of such scope makes all of us accomplices.
