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Berfin Hezil, a Yazidi journalist who witnessed the Islamic State (ISIS)’s genocidal campaign against her people in 2014, told Mezopotamya News Agency how the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) broke its promise to protect the Yazidis from the jihadists.
Worse still, Hezil said, the KDP made it impossible for the Yazidis to defend themselves.
Hezil’s footage, shot during ISIS attacks on the Yazidi area of Shengal in August 2014, showed KDP forces fleeing the conflict.
After the Iraqi army fled Mosul and ISIS occupied the city, jailed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) leader Abdullah Öcalan “kept warning us about saving the minorities and called on us to protect the Yazidis,” Hezil said.
Yet the KDP neglected its duty to protect the Yazidis in Shengal, an area of northern Iraq under the party’s control when the ISIS onslaught began, Hezil said.
Rather, “the KDP signed an agreement with ISIS” under which no forces were allowed to enter the area to defend the Yazidis, the journalist said.
“Despite all the PKK’s calls to the KDP for collaboration and collective action against ISIS, nothing was achieved,” said Hezil. The KDP “did not even allow the Yazidis to protect themselves,” she said.
Instead, the KDP’s armed forces, the Peshmerga, fled ISIS in Shengal and left the Yazidis at their mercy, said Hezil. “With the KDP’s agreement with ISIS, Yazidis were once again the victims of history.”
She added that many Yazidis died of hunger and thirst due to the ISIS attack.
Yazidi Genocide
On 3 August 2014, ISIS militants launched a genocide against the Yazidi community in Shengal, Iraqi Kurdistan.
Yazidi men who refused to convert to Islam were executed and left in mass graves.
An estimated 7,000 Yazidi women and girls, some as young as nine, were enslaved and forcibly transferred to locations in Iraq and eastern Syria. Held in sexual slavery, survivors reported being repeatedly sold, gifted, or passed around among ISIS fighters.
German lawmakers on July 7 recognised the 2014 massacres of the Yazidi community in Iraqi Kurdistan as a genocide.
A special UN investigation team announced in May 2021 that it had collected “clear and convincing evidence” that jihadists had committed genocide against Yazidis. In 2021, the Belgian and Dutch parliaments formally recognised the Yazidi genocide.
