Middle East analyst mentions World Refugee Day by mentioning the suffering of Yezidis
Kenny Bryce 2 hours ago
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres celebrated the International Day of Refugees in New York on Thursday, recalling some 70 million people forcibly displaced around the world. It is an unprecedented number. Recent years have witnessed record levels of human misery amidst this displacement. I have spent the last five years reporting many of these refugees and internally displaced persons. One of my memories that haunts me is my trip to Lash in Iraqi Kurdistan in 2015. June, like every summer in Iraq, was burning. He was still a strong supporter in June 2015, a threat to Iraq, Syria and the world. Their hordes of local and foreign fighters marched in Ramadi near Baghdad a month ago. It also captured Palmyra, the ancient oasis town of Syria, which was later targeted for destruction.
By June, the province of Kurdistan, largely isolated from Baghdad and Iraqi security forces, had stabilized along hundreds of kilometers of front lines.
Several million displaced people have fled the battle zones of Iraq, many of whom have lived in the Kurdistan region.
The worst was the hundreds of thousands of Yazidis who were forced to flee their homes around Mount Sinjar in August 2014, when he attacked a Yazidin preacher, where he called for the kidnapping of thousands of Yazidis, the separation of men and women, the killing of many men and the sale of women in the markets of slavery. This was an encouraging plan for the region: the genocide of minorities, including Christians, Shia Muslims and others, and the mass murder of anyone who blocked their way. The horrors of predatory crimes were known in 2015. These included systematic gang rape, the sale of women and children as sex slaves. The crimes are so horrific that even the writing about the mass gravesite vision of the victims is a four-year-old consensual renewal.
In June 2015, I traveled north of Erbil to Harham, a suburb of the city. Was comprised of 1430 people, mostly Arabs who fled from areas around Mosul. The camp kept clear statements about them: 531 came from Mosul itself, and 12 from Tal Afar, the city that forced the Shiites to flee. In total, 1385 came from Ninewa province in northern Iraq.
The refugees had no possessions except tents, shacks and a common oven for baking bread. Sewage leaked to a nearby construction site. A sign showed how to keep the camp healthier. People were in a state of collective trauma. Their land and homes were disposed of in the summer of 2014. A year later, they did not know whether they would return. I love many of them still living under the control of a preacher.
A day later, I went north of Erbil, the capital of the Kurdish region, towards the front line against a dipper. In a small Christian town called Tilskov, the Kurdish peshmerga armed the front with sandbags and dirt walls. Many Christians had fled when the city was in control in August 2014, but some returned six months later to form their armed unit. They put up their guns. A radio enabled us to listen to talkative fighters talking on the other side of the sand wall. Strange to hear the enemy are very close to us
On the way back from the front, the holy site of Aizi was invoked in Lalach for pilgrims. Located in the hills, the site has survived previous persecution of Yazidis by Islamic extremists. I had to go there just before sunset. A handy man wearing a red and white kaffiyeh headdress, and several women sat next to the spring of one of the pilgrimage sites. Everyone was barefoot to show respect for the area. Some people who lived in the area, or who came to observe their traditions, were refugees who fled from the areas attacked by them. One man reported an attack on Kojo, a Yezidi village where most of the population was abducted.
As someone who grew up hearing stories about the Holocaust, it was always hard to understand how the Holocaust could have looked in places like Belarus or Ukraine, where Jews were slaughtered. How did Babi Yar look like – where 33,000 Jews were killed in two days in 1941 -? Holocaust films often depict trains of deportation and concentration camps. A few films depict the bloody carnage shot by about 1.3 million people by Einsatzgruppen.
By talking to the refugees, I began to understand what it meant to survive, escape and flee, and to know that all members of the family had departed.
It took years to figure out the fate of the abducted Yazidis. While there are still a few women and children in Syria, there are about 3,000 people missing. As many as 100,000 Iraqi Yazidis may have left Iraq because of the genocide, and hundreds of thousands remain in camps years later. He is still threatening Sinjar, leaving behind mass graves. There are about 80 mass graves of Yazidis around Sinjar, and 68 religious sites were destroyed by Dahesh. According to KRG statistics, there are 2,745 orphans for aggravated crimes.
But the data are just numbers. The real story is that years later, as we sit on another world refugee day and hear a speech about refugees, we see how little has been accomplished.
The Yezidis were a clear and clear case for the victims who could be helped. It will not take much to help them rebuild or provide for their basic needs. But at every step on the road since the 2014 genocide, much has been accomplished. The international community has invested little resources in finding missing persons. Few resources have been invested in documenting mass graves. It took until this year for some international forensic experts to consider. Years too late. There was no Nuremberg trial for its perpetrators. In fact, most of the countries, including the European states that came from 5000 of the hooligans, recovered the killers and rapists. Only in Iraq are they tried. Justice is slow, and victims are rarely invited to testify. The camps in which the refugees live still lack infrastructure. For years in Sinjar there was hardly a medical clinic. There is little help for women who survived rape. Even when it comes to child victims of sexual abuse, there is little help. I saw a picture today of a woman volunteering to help orphans and children cope. These young children have almost nothing.
Genocide and crimes that produce refugees do not end when refugees arrive at the camp. Terror continues as long as there is no help for the victims. The number of Yezidis is hundreds of thousands, but if it can not even reach the most vulnerable, poor and targeted minorities, it will not reach the rest of the population.
Seth J. Frantzman, editor and Middle East analyst at the Jerusalem Post