A young Yezidi girl carries her sister in a camp for internally displaced persons in Iraq in 2015. —Mackenzie Knowles-Coursin for USHMM
Protecting Civilians In the Fight Against the Islamic State
The self-proclaimed Islamic State (IS) perpetrated crimes against humanity, war crimes, and ethnic cleansing against religious minority communities across northern Iraq between June and August 2014. As part of its deliberate campaign of terror, IS singled out Yezidi populations for genocide and continues to perpetrate genocide against Yezidis trapped under IS control, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The Museum issued a report by its Simon-Skjodt Center for the Prevention of Genocide, detailing the full range of crimes committed against Yezidis, Christians, Turkmen, Shabak, and other minority groups. This was the first such declaration by the Museum since 2004, when it declared a genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan.
In just three months in the summer of 2014, more than 800,000 people from millennia-old communities were forced from their homes by IS. In a deliberate campaign, the Islamic State kidnapped thousands of women and children and killed hundreds, likely thousands, of ethnic and religious minorities. IS destroyed shrines, temples, and churches. Today, virtually no members of the targeted communities remain in Ninewa province.
The November 2015 report, “'Our Generation Is Gone': The Islamic State's Targeting of Iraqi Minorities in Ninewa,” is based on research and oral testimony collected by staff of the Simon-Skjodt Center during a Bearing Witness trip to northern Iraq in September 2015. Displaced Iraqis who fled the Islamic State in June–August 2014 shared dozens of personal interviews detailing harrowing accounts of displacement, forced conversion, rape, torture, kidnapping, and murder. A collection of testimonies and photographs from the trip is made available on the Museum's website.
The Museum’s Simon-Skjodt Center report contends that there were early warning signs of potential genocide in Iraq that went unnoticed or misdiagnosed by the international community and local authorities.
In October 2016, a coalition of forces launched an offensive to drive IS from Mosul and surrounding areas in Ninewa, in northern Iraq.
While defeating IS would remove a formidable threat, the Simon-Skjodt Center warned that religious minorities and other civilians remained at risk and could face further atrocities in the future.
Long-standing territorial disputes, sectarian tensions existing prior to IS, and the large number of armed militias create a high risk for successor extremist groups, revenge killings against Sunni Arabs, and continued violence against religious and ethnic minorities by a weakened Islamic State.
In this October 2016 report, "Communities At Risk: Protecting Civilians in the Fight Against the Islamic State," the Simon-Skjodt Center laid out strategies to protect targeted groups and counter the political climate and lack of stability that allowed IS to flourish.