Life After Islamic State

Seth J. Frantzman

Politics, Middle East

Yazidis in Iraq have reclaimed land from ISIS, but the misery for many continues.

The Yazidi shopkeepers in Snuny, in northern Iraq, have a warmth about them that belies their circumstances. A year ago their town was liberated from ISIS by Kurdish peshmerga forces. The hope was that some of the 250,000 Yazidis who fled ISIS after the extremist group began massacring them and selling women into slavery would return to these tranquil plains. But the men, and it’s mostly men who have come back to tend their shops, say life here is impossible. “It’s very difficult to speak of the future. We were surrounded by Arabs, we are afraid of them returning,” says forty-year-old Hussein. “This is still a military zone, there is no electricity, we have nothing.”

In August of last year ISIS swept across northern Iraq, conquering thousands of square kilometers, an area approximate in size to the state of Connecticut. The extremist group had already taken over many of Iraq’s large Sunni cities, such as Mosul, Tikrit and Falluja between January and June 2014. Mount Shingal (“Sinjar” in Arabic) in northern Iraq is the center of this large district, which was home to diverse groups, including 250,000 members of the minority Yazidi faith. The religion of this group is not open to outsiders, but its origins are indigenous to Iraq and has diverse influences, including Islamic Sufi traditions. For hundreds of years, the group has been persecuted by Sunni Islamic rulers and accused of being heretics. Many Yazidis describe these persecutions as seventy-three individual genocides. They consider the mass killing by ISIS in 2014 as the seventy-fourth.

When ISIS established itself in Mosul, it gained a reputation for brutal persecution of minorities. Christians were ordered to convert or leave and their houses were marked with an Arabic letter “N.” According to locals, the Iraqi army abandoned its positions before ISIS invaded Shingal, leaving behind Kurdish peshmerga. ISIS advance was aided by having captured two brigades’ worth of Iraqi army military equipment just before August.