Yazidi Victims of ISIS Genocide cannot Return Home
Barzan Jurdo is 29 years old, from which he spent nine years in a refugee camp. We are sitting in front of his plastic tent, his temporary home for years, in Qasr Yazdin. He escaped his home in Sinjar on the 3rd of August 2014, when ISIS (the self-proclaimed “Islamic State”) attacked the town and the Yazidi villages around it, killing, kidnapping, raping, enslaving. Now, it’s been already years that ISIS has been defeated, and driven out of Sinjar, yet Barzan Jurdo cannot return home. “Our house is destroyed, and we do not have means to rebuilt it,” he explained, “but also Sinjar is not safe, there are numerous armed groups there.”
Qasr Yazdin is in Duhok province in Kurdistan Region of Iraq. It is an unofficial camp, which houses some 200 Yazidi families, each one of them has horror stories to tell. This little refugee village is not far from Khanke camp which is under the United Nations supervision and offers minimal health and education services. Why Barzan Jurdo does not live there? “Because there is no place inside the camp”, he answers. “I think I will try and leave Iraq. Here, there is no future. Especially for Yazidis,” he concludes our discussion.
ISIS spread its horrors on Sinjar from August 3, 2014, until November 13, 2015, when Kurdish and Yazidi fighters, supported by Coalition airstrikes, retook the town. Yet only a minority of its inhabitants went back home. The city itself which once had 70 thousand inhabitants, has no more than 2 thousand now.
“Hardly 150 thousand from the original 400 thousand returned to their homes” tells me Mirza Dinnayi, a prominent activist of Yazidi rights and community leader. Most of them have returned to villages to the north of Mount Sinjar. “Another hundred thousand have left the country. No Yazidi, no Christian will feel secure, because they ask: what will happen if another Daesh comes?”
The security issue is the major obstacle for Yazidis to return to their homes. Sinjar (or Shingal for the locals) has become a bone of contention between rival political groups and their armed factions: The Kurdish Democratic Party, the PKK, the Iraqi army, the Popular Mobilization Forces (Hash al-Shaabi), all control parts of the region. Moreover, Turkish military carries out regular air-raids against Kurdish guerrillas that are stationed in Sinjar mountains and threatens from time to time to carry out a major military attack. This power struggle, next to the lack of any serious aid to rebuilt what was destroyed, makes return impossible. 
Return of ISIS families without Reconciliation
While many Yazidis still cannot return home, some of the former ISIS members are returning to the region. On April 28, a demonstration broke out in Sinjar. Several Arab families who had previously joined ISIS, were returned to town by the Iraqi army. A Yazidi woman identified one of them, whose nickname was Haji Ayad, a member of ISIS who had kidnapped and raped her. In a video clip she says she identified him, adding that her father and brother kidnapped by ISIS remain unaccounted for.
Two dozen Yazidis started a demonstration to express their anger, demanding that those families who had committed crimes would not be allowed to return to town. But what followed reveals how far hate speech against Yazidis continues in Iraq and beyond. Rumours started circulating on social media, by some religious leaders, and by mass media, that Yazidis had attacked and burnt down a Sunni Muslim mosque in Sinjar. A video footage, which dated from 2014 of an attack against Mosib ben Omar mosque in Dayala, circulated freely on social media, and several Sheikhs made fiery sermons during the Friday prayers. Yazidis feared that rumours about an attack against a mosque could trigger new acts of violence against their community.
This event illustrates how ISIS families, who lived several years in camps, are being returned by simple political deals, without proper process of reconciliation with their former victims. “Arab Sunnis are still not ready to apologize to what happened to Yazidis, Christians, Shabaks, and others,” adds Mirza Dinnayi.
Hassan Jindi Hammo is both a refugee from Tal Banat and a police officer in charge of the security of Qasr Yazdin camp. He was serving in the early hours of August 3, 2014, when ISIS attacked Sinjar. “We did not expect any attack, we were surprised, we were forced to escape to the mountain”. In the massacres that followed he lost 14 of his family members, including his father. Who were the attackers, I ask? “The first two days, those who attacked us were our neighbours, from villages next-door. Now, those ex-ISIS fighters are returning under the protection of the army. They do not apologise, they are proud of what they did, and then they say they are innocent.”
He said that until now, politicians in Iraq “do not take the genocide against Yazidis seriously.”
