Yazidis fear returning to their homeland, 10 years after massacre

Yazidi women in traditional clothing stand outside their houses in the village of Dugure in Sinjar, Iraq, on July 16, 2024. (AP/File)
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Updated 02 August 2024
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Yazidis fear returning to their homeland, 10 years after massacre

  • Survivors fled up the slopes of Mount Sinjar, where some were trapped for many weeks by a Daesh siege
  • The assault on the Yazidis — an ancient religious minority in eastern Syria and northwest Iraq — was part of the militant Daesh’s effort to establish a caliphate

SINJAR, Iraq: Fahad Qassim was just 11 years old when Daesh militants overran his Yazidi community in the Sinjar region of northern Iraq in August 2014, taking him captive.
The attack was the start of what became the systematic slaughter, enslavement, and rape of thousands of Yazidis, shocking the world and displacing most of the 550,000-strong ancient religious minority. Thousands of people were rounded up and killed during the initial assault, which began in the early hours of Aug. 3.
Many more are believed to have died in captivity. Survivors fled up the slopes of Mount Sinjar, where some were trapped for many weeks by a Daesh siege.
The assault on the Yazidis — an ancient religious minority in eastern Syria and northwest Iraq that draws from Zoroastrian, Christian, Manichean, Jewish and Muslim beliefs — was part of the militant Daesh’s effort to establish a caliphate.
At one stage, the group held a third of Iraq and neighboring Syria before being pushed back by US-backed forces and Iran-backed militias and collapsing in 2019.
Now 21, Qassim lives in a small apartment on the edge of a refugee camp in the Kurdistan region of Iraq, far from his hometown.
He was trained as a child soldier and fought in grinding battles before being liberated as Daesh collapsed in Syria’s Bagjhuz in 2019, but only after losing the bottom half of his leg to an airstrike by the US-led forces.
“I don’t plan for any future in Iraq,” he said, waiting for news on a visa application to a Western country.
“Those who go back say they fear the same thing that happened in 2014 will happen again.”
Qassim’s reluctance to return is shared by many. A decade after what has been recognized as a genocide by many governments and UN agencies, Sinjar district remains largely destroyed.
The old city of Sinjar is a confused heap of grey and brown stone, while villages like Kojo, where hundreds were killed, are crumbling ghost towns.
Limited services, poor electricity and water supply, and what locals say is inadequate government compensation for rebuilding have made resettlement challenging.

POWER STRUGGLE
The security situation further complicates matters. A mosaic of armed groups that fought to free Sinjar have remained in this strategic corner of Iraq, holding de facto power on the ground.
This is despite the 2020 Sinjar Agreement that called for such groups to leave and for the appointment of a mayor with a police force composed of locals.
And from the skies above, frequent Turkish drone strikes target fighters aligned with the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) that is outlawed by Turkiye. Civilians are among those killed in these attacks, adding to the sense of insecurity.
Akhtin Intiqam, a 25-year-old commander in the PKK-aligned Sinjar Protection Units (YBS), one of the armed factions in the area, defends their continued presence:
“We are in control of this area and we are responsible for protecting Sinjar from all external attacks,” she said.
Speaking in a room adorned with pictures of fallen comrades, numbering more than 150, Intiqam views the Sinjar Agreement with suspicion.
“We will fight with all our power against anyone who tries to implement this plan. It will never succeed,” she said.

GOVERNMENT EFFORTS
As the stalemate continues, Sinjar remains underdeveloped. Families who do return receive a one-time payment of about $3,000 from the government.
Meanwhile, more than 200,000 Yazidis remain in Kurdistan, many living in shabby tent settlements. The Iraqi government is pushing to break up these camps, insisting it’s time for people to go home.
“You can’t blame people for having lost hope. The scale of the damage and displacement is very big and for many years extremely little was done to address it,” said Khalaf Sinjari, the Iraqi prime minister’s adviser for Yazidi affairs.
This government, he said, was taking Sinjar seriously.
It plans to spend hundreds of millions of dollars – including all previously unspent budgets since 2014 — on development and infrastructure, including for paying compensation, building two new hospitals and a university and linking Sinjar to the country’s water network for the first time. “There is hope to bring back life,” said Sinjari, himself a member of the Yazidi community.
However, the presence of an estimated 50,000 Daesh fighters and their families across the border in Syria in detention centers and camps stokes fears of history repeating itself.
Efforts by some Iraqi lawmakers to pass a general amnesty law that could see the freeing of many Daesh prisoners from Iraqi jails only add to these concerns. And the Yazidi struggle for justice is stalled, with the government this year ending a UN mission that sought to help bring Daesh fighters to trial for international crimes, citing a lack of cooperation between it and the mission.
Despite the challenges, some Yazidis are choosing to return. Farhad Barakat Ali, a Yazidi activist and journalist who was displaced by Daesh, made the decision to go back several years ago.
“I’m not encouraging everyone to return to Sinjar, but I am also not encouraging them to stay at the IDP camps either,” he said from his home in Sinjar city, in the stifling heat of a power cut.
“Having your hometown — living in your hometown — is something that people can be proud of.”


Netanyahu to delay departure for US due to security situation in north: Israeli official

Updated 20 September 2024
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Netanyahu to delay departure for US due to security situation in north: Israeli official

  • Netanyahu delayed his visit to the US by one day
  • During his visit to the United States, Netanyahu will address the annual UN General Assembly session

JERUSALEM: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will delay his departure to New York by a day due to the security situation in the country’s north, an official in his office told AFP on Friday.
“Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has delayed his visit to the US by one day in light of the security situation in the north of Israel,” the official said, asking not to be named. He said that Netanyahu will now travel on September 25, instead of September 24 as previously planned.
During his visit to the United States, Netanyahu will address the annual UN General Assembly session. He is scheduled to return to Israel on September 28.
Israel is engaged in fierce cross-border clash in the country’s north with the Lebanese Hezbollah group, with the situation deteriorating in recent days.
On Friday, the Israeli military carried out a “targeted strike” in Beirut, which a source close to Hezbollah said killed one of its top military leaders.


Israel investigates after videos show soldiers pushing bodies off West Bank roof

Updated 20 September 2024
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Israel investigates after videos show soldiers pushing bodies off West Bank roof

  • The videos showed three soldiers on the roof of a building in the town of Qabatiya, dragging, pushing, throwing and in one case kicking what appear to be dead men off the edge
  • Zakaria Zakarneh, the uncle of one of the men, said he saw what had happened

QABATIYA, West Bank: The Israeli military said on Friday it had opened an investigation after videos showed soldiers pushing what appear to be dead bodies off a roof in the occupied West Bank during a raid against Palestinian militants.
The videos, which began circulating online on Thursday, showed three soldiers on the roof of a building in the town of Qabatiya, dragging, pushing, throwing and in one case kicking what appear to be dead men off the edge.
Zakaria Zakarneh, the uncle of one of the men, said he saw what had happened. Israeli soldiers had gone to the roof after the Palestinians were killed, he told Reuters.
“They tried to move the bodies down with a bulldozer but it didn’t work so they threw them from the second floor down to the ground,” he said. “I was in pain, very sad and angry I was unable to do anything,” Zakarneh said.
Reuters was able to confirm the location of the video as Qabatiya and confirm the date from eyewitness accounts and video filmed by local Palestinian news organizations showing the same scene.
The Israeli military said in a statement the incident was serious and was not in keeping with its values.
In a separate statement, it said that on Thursday its soldiers had killed seven militants in gunbattles and an airstrike in Qabatiya.
Violence has surged in the West Bank since the start of the war in Gaza nearly a year ago, with almost daily sweeps by Israeli forces that have involved thousands of arrests and regular gunbattles between security forces and Palestinian fighters, as well as attacks by Jewish settlers on Palestinian communities.


Top Hezbollah commander among at least 3 killed in Israel strike on Beirut

Updated 22 min 4 sec ago
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Top Hezbollah commander among at least 3 killed in Israel strike on Beirut

  • Total of eight people killed and 59 wounded, Lebanon’s health ministry said
  • Ibrahim Aqil killed in Israeli strike, according to two security sources

BEIRUT: A source close to Hezbollah in Lebanon said an Israel air strike Friday killed one of its top military leaders, with Israel confirming it had carried out a “targeted strike” in Beirut.
Requesting anonymity to discuss sensitive matters, the source said the Israeli strike on Hezbollah’s stronghold in south Beirut killed the head of the group’s elite Radwan unit, Ibrahim Aqil.
A total of eight people were killed and 59 wounded, Lebanon’s health ministry said.
Israel said it had conducted a “targeted strike” in Beirut, where a security official said an air strike had hit Hezbollah’s stronghold in the south of the city.
The air strike is the third to hit the southern suburbs of Beirut since the start of the Israel-Hamas war on Oct. 7, with the focus of the violence shifting dramatically this week from Gaza to Lebanon.
Strikes blamed on Israel killed a top commander of Hezbollah, Fuad Shukr, in July, and a leader of allied Palestinian militant group Hamas, Saleh Al-Aruri, in January.

Earlier Friday, Israel said Hezbollah had fired dozens of rockets from Lebanon following air strikes which destroyed dozens of the militant group’s launchers.
On Thursday, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah vowed retribution for deadly sabotage attacks on its communications that he blamed on Israel.
Israel has not commented on the communications device explosions, but the intensifying violence comes after it announced it was shifting its war objectives to its northern border with Lebanon.
For nearly a year, Israeli firepower has focused on Palestinian militant group Hamas in Gaza, but its troops have also been engaged in near-daily exchanges with Hezbollah.
The intensifying exchanges came as the UN Security Council prepared to discuss this week’s attacks on Hezbollah pagers and two-way radios, which killed 37 people and wounded thousands over two days.
Hezbollah said it targeted at least six Israeli military bases with salvos of rockets after overnight bombardment people in south Lebanon described as among the fiercest so far.
“Some 140 rockets were fired from Lebanon within an hour,” an Israeli military spokeswoman said.
The military said that overnight its jets hit infrastructure and “approximately 100 launchers” ready to be fired.
Hezbollah said two of its fighters were killed, without elaborating.
Residents of Marjayoun, a Lebanese town close to the border, said the overnight bombardment was among the heaviest since the border exchanges began last October.
“We were very scared, especially for my grandchildren,” said Nuha Abdo, 62. “We were moving them from one room to another.”
Clothing store owner Elie Rmeih, 45, counted more than 50 strikes.
“It was a terrifying scene and unlike anything we have experienced since the escalation began.
“We live in fear of a wider war, you don’t know where to go.”
International mediators have repeatedly tried to avert a full-blown war between Israel and Hezbollah and staunch the regional fallout of the Gaza war started by Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel.
Speaking for the first time since the device blasts, Nasrallah warned Israel would face retribution for the communications device blasts.
Describing the attacks as a “massacre” and a possible “act of war,” Nasrallah said Israel would face “just punishment, where it expects it and where it does not.”
Cross-border exchanges between Israel and Hezbollah have killed hundreds in Lebanon, mostly fighters, and dozens in Israel.
Tens of thousands of people on both sides of the border have fled their homes.
Speaking to troops on Wednesday, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said: “Hezbollah will pay an increasing price” as Israel tries to “ensure the safe return” of its citizens to border areas.
“We are at the start of a new phase in the war,” he said.
Senior UN officials have expressed concern about the legality of the sabotage of Hezbollah’s communication devices.
UN human rights chief Volker Turk called the blasts “shocking,” and said their impact on civilians was “unacceptable.”
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who has been scrambling to salvage efforts for a Gaza ceasefire and hostage release deal, called for restraint on all sides.
“We don’t want to see any escalatory actions by any party” that would endanger the goal of a Gaza ceasefire, he said.
Hamas’s October 7 attacks that sparked the Gaza war resulted in the deaths of 1,205 people, mostly civilians, on the Israeli side, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli official figures that include hostages killed in captivity.
Out of 251 hostages seized by militants, 97 are still held in Gaza, including 33 the Israeli military says are dead.
Israel’s retaliatory military offensive has killed at least 41,272 people in Gaza, most of them civilians, according to figures provided by the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry. The United Nations has acknowledged the figures as reliable.
In the latest Gaza violence, the territory’s civil defense agency said an air strike on a house in Nuseirat refugee camp killed eight people. Another six people, including children, were killed in a separate strike on an apartment in Gaza City, it added.
The preliminary findings of a Lebanese investigation found the pagers that exploded had been booby-trapped, a security official said.
Lebanon’s UN mission concurred, saying in a letter that the probe showed “the targeted devices were professionally booby-trapped... before arriving in Lebanon, and were detonated by sending emails to the devices.”
The New York Times reported Wednesday that the pagers that exploded were produced by the Hungary-based BAC Consulting on behalf of Taiwanese manufacturer Gold Apollo. It cited intelligence officers as saying BAC was part of an Israeli front.
A government spokesman in Budapest said the company was “a trading intermediary, with no manufacturing or operational site in Hungary.”


Iraq’s Kataib Hezbollah says fighter killed in “Zionist attack” in Damascus

Updated 20 September 2024
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Iraq’s Kataib Hezbollah says fighter killed in “Zionist attack” in Damascus

  • A fighter got killed in the “Zionist attack”

DUBAI: Iraq’s Kataib Hezbollah armed group announced that one of its fighters was killed in what they called a “Zionist attack” in the Syrian capital Damascus, the group said in a statement on Telegram on Friday.


Israel-Hezbollah exchanges intensify on Lebanon border

Updated 20 September 2024
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Israel-Hezbollah exchanges intensify on Lebanon border

  • The intensifying exchanges came as the UN Security Council prepared to discuss this week’s attacks on Hezbollah pagers and two-way radios
  • Hezbollah said it targeted at least six Israeli military bases with salvos of rocket fire in response to overnight bombardment

BEIRUT: Israel said Hezbollah fired dozens of rockets from Lebanon on Friday following overnight air strikes which destroyed dozens of launchers after its leader vowed retribution for deadly sabotage attacks on its communications.
The intensifying exchanges came as the UN Security Council prepared to discuss this week’s attacks on Hezbollah pagers and two-way radios, which killed 37 people and wounded thousands over two days.
Hezbollah said it targeted at least six Israeli military bases with salvos of rocket fire in response to overnight bombardment which people in south Lebanon described as among the fiercest so far.
“Some 140 rockets were fired from Lebanon within an hour,” an Israeli military spokeswoman said.
The military said that overnight its jets hit infrastructure and “approximately 100 launchers” ready to be fired.
Hezbollah said two of its fighters were killed, without elaborating.
Residents of Marjayoun, a Lebanese town close to the border, said the bombardment was among the heaviest since the border exchanges began in October last year.
“We were very scared, especially for my grandchildren,” said Nuha Abdo, 62. “We were moving them from one room to another.”
Clothing store owner Elie Rmeih, 45, said he counted more than 50 strikes.
“It was a terrifying scene and unlike anything we have experienced since the escalation began.
“We live in fear of a wider war, you don’t know where to go.”
The communications device explosions and intensifying air strikes came after Israel announced it was shifting its war objectives to its northern border with Lebanon.
For nearly a year, Israel’s firepower has been focused on Palestinian militant group Hamas in Gaza, but its troops have also been engaged in near-daily exchanges with Hezbollah militants.
International mediators have repeatedly tried to avert a full-blown war between Israel and Hezbollah and staunch the regional fallout of the Gaza war started by Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel.
Hezbollah maintains its fight is in support of Hamas, and its leader Hassan Nasrallah vowed on Thursday that the attacks on Israel would continue as long as the war in Gaza lasts.
Speaking for the first time since the device blasts, Nasrallah warned Israel would face retribution.
Describing the attacks as a “massacre” and a possible “act of war,” Nasrallah said Israel would face “just punishment, where it expects it and where it does not.”
The cross-border exchanges have killed hundreds in Lebanon, mostly fighters, and dozens in Israel, including soldiers. Tens of thousands of people on both sides of the border have fled their homes.
Speaking to troops on Wednesday, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said: “Hezbollah will pay an increasing price” as Israel tries to “ensure the safe return” of its citizens to border areas.
“We are at the start of a new phase in the war,” he said.
Foreign Minister Abdallah Bou Habib said the “blatant assault on Lebanon’s sovereignty and security” was a dangerous development that could “signal a wider war.”
Speaking ahead of a UN Security Council meeting on the attacks set for Friday, he said Lebanon had filed a complaint against “Israel’s cyber-terrorist aggression that amounts to a war crime.”
Senior UN officials have also expressed concern about the legality of the Israeli sabotage.
UN human rights chief Volker Turk called the blasts “shocking,” and said their impact on civilians was “unacceptable.”
UN chief Antonio Guterres said it was “very important... not to weaponize civilian objects.”
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who has been scrambling to salvage efforts for a Gaza ceasefire and hostage release deal, called for restraint by everyone.
“We don’t want to see any escalatory actions by any party” that would endanger the goal of a Gaza ceasefire, he said.
British Foreign Secretary David Lammy expressed “deep concern” over the rising tensions and renewed a call for Britons to leave Lebanon, saying the “situation could deteriorate rapidly.”
Hamas’s October 7 attacks that sparked the Gaza war resulted in the deaths of 1,205 people, mostly civilians, on the Israeli side, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli official figures that include hostages killed in captivity.
Out of 251 hostages seized by militants, 97 are still held in Gaza, including 33 the Israeli military says are dead.
Israel’s retaliatory military offensive has killed at least 41,272 people in Gaza, most of them civilians, according to figures provided by the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry. The United Nations has acknowledged the figures as reliable.
In the latest Gaza violence, the territory’s civil defense agency said an air strike on a house in Nuseirat refugee camp killed eight people. Another six people, including children, were killed in a separate strike on an apartment in Gaza City, it added.
The preliminary findings of a Lebanese investigation found the pagers that exploded had been booby-trapped, a security official said.
Lebanon’s UN mission concurred, saying in a letter that the probe showed “the targeted devices were professionally booby-trapped... before arriving in Lebanon, and were detonated by sending emails to the devices.”
The New York Times reported Wednesday that the pagers that exploded were produced by the Hungary-based BAC Consulting on behalf of Taiwanese manufacturer Gold Apollo. It cited intelligence officers as saying BAC was part of an Israeli front.
A government spokesman in Budapest said the company was “a trading intermediary, with no manufacturing or operational site in Hungary.”