Fréderike Geerdink
Yezidi students from the university in Duhok in the Kurdistan Region in Iraq have been reluctant to go to the city for groceries, afraid they will be attacked because of their religion. The security around the Yezidi displacement camps has been ramped up. Why? There is an ongoing wave of hate speech against the Yezidis, reminiscent of ISIS’ lethal rhetoric against the community. That the Kurdistan Regional Government hardly does anything to stop it, shows how deeply rooted the problem is.
The hate speech against the Yezidi community started last week. Some Arab families had returned to the Shengal region (the home region of the Yezidis, where Arab families have always lived as well), which some Yezidi youth protested against when they discovered an ISIS member was among them. Some stones were thrown but nothing serious happened, but soon, the false rumour spread that Yezidis had attacked and damaged the local Rahman Mosque.
Vulnerable
Despite the debunking of the rumours, the hate speech continued, and this week, it still didn’t subside. On social media Iraqis and Kurds ranted against the Yezidi community, and a number of local clerics in the Kurdistan Region began spewing hatred against the Yezidis during their Friday prayers. As a consequence, the Yezidi community feels more vulnerable than they already do – the examples mentioned in the beginning of this column come from an interesting Twitter Space, in which Yazda co-founder and president of the Sinjar Academy Murad Ismail reflected on the situation.
The hate speech of course doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Firstly, it must be understood that the rhetoric used by certain imams now, calling Yezidis ‘devil worshippers’, is chillingly similar to the wording ISIS used when the genocide began in 2014. But secondly, that it surfaces so easily and the Kurdistan Regional Government hardly speaks out, speaks to a larger reality of discrimination of and distrust against the Yezidis. Not only in the Kurdistan Region actually, but in the whole of Iraq as well: the Iraqi government has remained totally silent.
Intention
The Kurdistan Region did release a statement, but the weakest one possible, without even explicitly condemning the hate speech. The statement was released by the Office of the Coordinator for International Advocacy and not, for example, by the presidency or the prime minister. The statement repeatedly claims that it were only a few imams resorting to hate speech (five, they say, while other sources claimed there were around thirty) and that they ‘did not have the intention to propagate hateful rhetoric’. Subsequently, the government ‘entity’ patted itself on the back for its self-proclaimed commitment to the Yezidi community.
This weak statement is a reflection of the KDP’s relation with the Yezidi community. They are always quick to make a meeting with Yezidis into a photo opportunity for social media channels, with which they try to show how much religious freedom there is in the KRG, but when they are desperately needed to protect the community, they remain silent and inactive.
Peshmerga
Most tragic example is the unfolding of events just before the genocide started, in 2014. Shengal was under the de-facto protection of the KDP peshmerga at the time. The region is one of the ‘disputed territories’ and lies (far) outside the Kurdistan Region (KRI). ISIS was approaching, but the Yezidi community thought they were protected by the peshmerga and that they would be safe. But instead of trying to protect the community against the genocidal gangs, the peshmerga were ordered to withdraw from Shengal and return to the KRI. The Yezidis had to run for their lives and stranded on Shengal Mountain where many perished. They were eventually rescued by the PKK, which rushed and tried to safe the situation, and escorted the population to safer grounds across the border in Rojava.
The Yezidi community was apparently not worth the lives of KDP’s peshmerga fighters. Or what was it exactly that made the Barzanis order the peshmerga to withdraw? Was it a ‘tactical’ decision, as some people who defend the withdrawal say? What kind of deranged tactic was that, leading to genocide? Up until today, the KDP has refused a thorough and independent investigation into what happened those days, and why. Nobody has been held to account.
Militias
A more recent example of the deeply rooted contempt for the Yezidi community, is the so-called Sinjar Agreement of October 2020. This is an agreement between the federal Iraqi government in Baghdad and the Kurdistan Regional government, forged under the auspices of the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI) and supported by Turkey. It was meant to end the very unstable situation in the region, where several armies, militias and political parties competed for influence. The pact would enable the Yezidis to return to their homelands.
Problem was: the Yezidis were not involved in the negotiations about the deal. Not the Yezidis in the displacement camps in the Kurdistan Region, not the Yezidis who lived in Shengal, not the self-defence forces that had been set up in the early days of the genocide. The agreement was doomed to fail.
Autonomy
Not only does the Kurdistan Regional Government have a deep contempt for the Yezidi community, it also wants to control and instrumentalise it, these two developments show. Yezidis can exist as long as they dance to the KDP’s tune, and don’t demand autonomy and the right to self-determination.
As long as the KRI, and especially the KDP, doesn’t face its historic mistakes and the supremacist tendencies lying underneath it, it will never develop a way to relate to the Yezidi community that sees them as equals and as free people who are in charge of their own fate. And as long as that doesn’t happen, the Yezidis will not be safe.
Fréderike Geerdink is an independent journalist. Follow her on Twitter or subscribe to her acclaimed weekly newsletter Expert Kurdistan.
