Sinjar Autonomous Assembly deputy co-chair Heso İbrahim pointed out that during the ongoing massacre by Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) that Masoud Barzani said to the religous leader of Yazidi people, Xertu Haci İsmail, “Tell your people to become Muslims”.
ISIS killed thousands of people capturing over seven thousand women and children during its attacks against Sinjar region where Yazidi people lived on 3 August 2014. Those attacks led 400 thousand people to migrate. Heso İbrahim spoke to journalist M. Ali Beydağı.
Heso also noted that some Yazidi people had pleaded with the peshmerga who had deserted their posts in Sinjar, just before ISIS attacked ‘Since you are leaving us defenceless, give us your weapons.’ There was an argument and “The Peshmerga fired on the people and three Yazidis were martyred as a result. Though they killed three Yazidis for demanding weapons to protect themselves, the peshmerga left Sinjar not shooting a single bullet against ISIS. Yazidis were killed, their women, daughters were kidnapped. Their story is known.”
İbrahim also shared details about a meeting that took place between former Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) chair Masoud Barzani and Yazidi people’s religious leader Xertu Haci İsmail (Bavê Şêx), who passed away on 1 October 2017 when he was 87 years old.
Response of Barzani
Regarding the meeting , İbrahim noted, “The plan was to massace all the Yazidis, destroying all of them. They captured the gate Sihela Beravê. They ran away from ISIS and captured the gate of the bridge in order to prevent people to escape. Bavê Şêx told Barzani ‘People are in stuck in there,’ when he attended a meeting with him. And Barzani told him ‘Tell your people to become Muslims.’ We were Yazidis in the past as well. We became Muslims and got rid of the decree. After that Bavê Şêx began to cry. Masoud sometimes says he has not forgotten the tears of Bave Şex. He tells the truth, he will not. Because Bave Şex resisted. We will also resist.”
İbrahim recalled that as far as they knew ISIS captured over seven thousand people in that time and said, “It is not clear how many of those people were killed or alive. There are around 80 mass graves. How many of them belongs to Yazidis is not clear. Maybe Shiites were buried in some of them too. Apart from the number of people who were martyred by ISIS and escaped from ISIS, the fate of over three thousand people is unknown.”