Legal consequences, alongside formal recognition, are urgently needed for the Yazidi genocide and feminicide committed by the Islamic State (ISIS) on 3 August 2014 in Sinjar (Şengal), Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI), urged the Kurdistan National Congress (KNK) in a statement issued on Wednesday.
The KNK said that ISIS carried out the genocide and systematic mass abductions of women and girls into sexual slavery as a proxy of Turkey. Of the women kidnapped that day, 3,000 remain missing, and tens of thousands continue to suffer from trauma, according to the Yazidi Free Women’s Movement (TAJÊ).
While several states have recognised the crime against Yazidis as genocide, the United Kingdom being the most recent, the KNK argued that recognition alone has no legal consequences, and the absence of legal action only emboldens perpetrators.
The statement further claimed that Turkey under President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan aims to drive Yazidis out of Sinjar altogether, attacking civilian facilities such as hospitals and schools, in addition to Yazidi defence forces. The goal, according to the KNK, is to accomplish the terrorism that ISIS left unfinished and to depopulate the Yazidi homeland, known as ‘Yezidixan’, in order to occupy and ‘Turkify’ it.
The KNK’s statement also criticised the 9 October agreement between Iraq, the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and Turkey, mediated by the UN, and called for its immediate cancellation. It demanded the recognition of Yezidixan as an autonomous area, reflecting the ongoing struggle for autonomy and protection in a region where wars are waged in the name of religion.
