Iraq, ten years after ISIS’ genocide

Ten years ago this month, the army of the Islamic State (or ISIS) swept through Sinjar and the Nineveh Plains in northern Iraq. These two regions were the ancestral homelands of two of Iraq’s oldest religious communities – Yazidis and Assyrian Christians, respectively.

Overnight, over 120,000 Christians fled their homes. Many who did not flee in time were kidnapped or killed. The Yazidis suffered even more. Following a carefully scripted program of genocide, ISIS fighters captured thousands of Yazidis, slaughtered the men and boys, and forced the women into sex slavery.

ISIS’ attack was not the beginning of persecution for Iraq’s Christians. Far from it. In the chaos unleashed by the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the civil war that followed, Islamist militias systematically targeted Christians in Iraq’s cities, kidnapping and murdering priests, expelling Christians from their homes at gunpoint, and bombing churches.

Over the next ten years, a supermajority of these Christians fled their homeland. 

When the U.S. invaded in Iraq in 2003, there were over one million Christians living in the country, constituting one of the largest Christian communities in the Middle East. Over the next ten years, a supermajority of these Christians fled their homeland. 

ISIS’s attack was more than persecution, however. It was an international media sensation. ISIS’ choreographed acts of extreme violence were disseminated across the world by its sophisticated social media operation. For the first time since the Iraq War began, there was a global media spotlight on the suffering of Christians in the country.

The U.S. officially recognized ISIS’s campaign against Christians and Yazidis as a genocide. Both President Obama, then President Trump, waged war against ISIS, killing thousands of civilians and destroying multiple cities in the Middle East in the process. Kurdish and Iranian-backed forces joined in the fight against the Islamic State. By 2017, ISIS had lost most of its territory in Iraq. In October 2019, U.S. special forces assassinated the group’s leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, in Syria. 

However, the end of ISIS’s self-proclaimed “caliphate” did not equate to justice for its Christian and Yazidi victims. 

Unable to return, many Christians and Yazidis are abandoning their homeland for good and emigrating.

According to William Warda, an Iraqi Christian activist who has long partnered with the organization I work for, Christian Solidarity International, only 55,000 of the 120,000 Christians who fled the Nineveh Plains in 2014 have been able to return home. Fewer than half of the Yazidis who fled from Sinjar have gone back. 200,000 of them are still living in camps – 10 years later.

Iraq’s central government in Baghdad, and the autonomous Kurdish Regional Government in northern Iraq, both claim jurisdiction over Sinjar and the Nineveh Plains. The competition between these two capitals over the Christians’ and the Yazidis’ land has hindered reconstruction, and both governments have at times actively blocked the return of the people who fled in 2014. Unable to return, many Christians and Yazidis are abandoning their homeland for good and emigrating. In 2020, the U.S. brokered an agreement between Baghdad and the KRG about how Sinjar would be administered. There was no Yazidi input in the agreement.

What is more, the government of Turkey, a key U.S. NATO ally, routinely bombs northern Iraq in its campaign against Kurdish militant groups. These constant bombings – and the looming threat of a larger invasion – make it nearly impossible for Christians and Yazidis to return and rebuild. In July this year, the Turkish army moved onto Iraqi territory and pushed an entire village of Christians out of their homes.

Of the 6,500 or so Yazidi women and children who were enslaved by ISIS, around 2,700 of them are still missing. Horrifically, many of them are likely being held in a U.S.-backed prison camp. Al Hol camp in Syria, run by the U.S.-supported Syrian Democratic Forces, is home to 55,000 people who were detained during the war, mostly ISIS fighters and their family members. 44,500 of the camp’s residents are women and children. Hundreds of Yazidi women are believed to be in al Hol camp, with their captors.

In short, ISIS’ victims are still being victimized today, because the powers that defeated ISIS are maneuvering against each other to maintain their position in the region.

If this perspective is bleak, it is because it is a perspective focused on the powers of this world.

This situation is similar to the conditions that led to the 2014 genocide in the first place. ISIS’s 2014 invasion of Iraq was so shocking that it briefly united the region’s diverse players against it. But until then, most of these players had been trying to take advantage of ISIS’ rise. ISIS invaded Iraq from Syria, where it had built its support base within the rebellion against Syria’s dictatorship – a rebellion that the U.S. and its allies stoked, funded and armed. ISIS received extensive support from Turkish intelligence leading up to the 2014 genocide. Before ISIS attacked Sinjar and the Nineveh Plains, KRG armed forces prevented Yazidis and Christians from evacuating, and in some cases confiscated their weapons. The KRG promised the Yazidis and Christians that they would protect them from ISIS. Then, when ISIS moved on the region, KRG forces withdrew without warning, facilitating the slaughter that followed.

This is the brutal reality for Christians and religious minorities in today’s Middle East: not only is there no superpower or regional power interested in protecting them, but most of the players in the region are only too willing to sacrifice Christians for the sake of gaining momentary strategic advantage against each other. We see this as well in the Caucasus region, where a geopolitical chess game between the U.S. and Russia led last year to the demise of one of the world’s oldest Christian communities – the Armenian Christians of Nagorno Karabakh.

If this perspective is bleak, it is because it is a perspective focused on the powers of this world. It is, I believe, important for Christians engaged on these issues to see these powers as they are.

Thank God, there is another perspective that Christians have access to – one informed by the sure knowledge of our Savior’s faithfulness to us.

As our friend William told us recently, “To my surprise, when the dark days of 2014 came, I never felt afraid. It was as if God had given me new energy to endure.”

May the same be true for Iraq’s Christians, and for all of us in the years ahead.

The author with displaced children in northern Iraq, June 2014. ©CSI