The history of the Yazidis of Sinjar has been engraved with ten long years: a decade of survival and loss, but not really losing hope for peace. The heavy air of bittersweet sentiment pervades the return of the trickling families into their ancestral homeland, showing how profound the psychological scarring from the bestial attack by the Islamic State group has been.
On that fateful morning of August 3, 2014, the ISIS forces with utmost mercilessness attacked members of the Yazidi community. The choices that were left for any person to find him or herself in the midst of this crisis included conversion, fleeing, or facing instant death. In a couple of weeks, the glazed offensive claimed over 5,000 Yazidi lives. The murders were endless, coupled with the capture of many women and children who were to be enslaved.
Rayhan, 24, is a young Yazidi and survivor who typifies the indomitable will of such survivors. Separated from her family in the melee, Rayhan has reunited with her brother and resettled in Sinjar. She shares the dream of most survivors: to leave Iraq. The surrounding villages stand as testaments to a violent history, having been whole and alive in the not-so-distant past. Ruined houses, trees, and barren landscapes stand stark in the minds of people as accounts of lost lives and family ties torn asunder.
But a decade later, the remembrance of the genocide still stark, aged scars far from hidden by the flow of time. More or less around 2 600 souls from Yazidis are still missing, with mass graves only partially unearthed, mourning the silence of their buried secrets under untouched earth. Raising many a question, heavy in their silent despair on those returning to start again rebuilding lives.
An estimated 350,000 Yazidis fled into the world during genocidal times when they were shown asylum, wherever they could find it. Ten years later, from the beginning of 2024, between 130,000-150,000 of these people have returned to Sinjar to receive punishment from the capital, with much-enforced pressure from the Iraqi government to close camps for internally displaced people (IDPs) in the relatively safer region of Iraqi Kurdistan.
In this context, however, life within Sinjar resumes its fragile and resumed motion in this region. While anger subsides after the act of destruction, fear is persistent and inexhaustible, as rancid as the spots that leap in dark and distorted, sinful terrains. The threat which is always present is that the new generation of people may be repeating the gruesome actions of their ancestors. To many the killing of 2014 is not something which occurred many years ago, in the dim and distant past, but it was yesterday, today, now.
Despite the tragedy that the Yazidis of Sinjar have experienced, starting over from scratch with nothing but the wreckage around them is simply incredible. But the painful experience remains persistent; it serves as a never-ending alarm of insecurity and the possible break down of the community, which can be easily triggered again. With their lives slowly returning to what passes for stability they have one thing for which to strive—peace.
Today, Yezidi homeland is a colorful chronicle of resistance interspersed with an occasional painful memory. Suffering has become synonymous with perseverance, and for ten years grief has composed an imperative story both tense and devastating. This is a tragic but true tale of the Yazidis struggling to rebuild peoplehood in order to carve out a better and distant future for themselves.
I wept through their story to bear witness not of a wiped out past but of a nation continuously searching for a bomb in a messed world, struggling yet experiencing triumph in a weighted space.
