Yazidi genocide survivors in Iraq recall horrors of Daesh’s siege of Kocho

A soldier inspects the remains of members of the Yazidi minority killed by Daesh in a mass grave in Sinjar. (AFP)
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Updated 14 August 2024
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Yazidi genocide survivors in Iraq recall horrors of Daesh’s siege of Kocho

  • Daesh militants launched a genocidal campaign against the ethno-religious minority in their Iraqi homeland in August 2014
  • Kocho, uniquely among the 80-plus Yazidi villages in Sinjar, was subjected to a 12-day siege before the slaughter began

LONDON: For 12 days in August 2014, the lives of the inhabitants of the Yazidi village of Kocho hung in a fearful balance.

In the early hours of Aug. 3, Daesh fighters had swept west from Mosul, attacking the town of Sinjar and the dozens of Yazidi villages scattered to the south of Mount Sinjar in the Nineveh Governorate of northern Iraq.

The approximately 1,200 residents of Kocho were woken at about 2 a.m. by the sound of gunfire coming from surrounding villages. At any moment, they feared, their turn would come.

It would, indeed, come, and in the most brutal fashion. But Kocho would experience a fate unique among the suffering of the 80-plus Yazidi villages in the region.




Ten years on from the massacres, 200,000 Yazidis remain in those camps, refugees in their own country, unable or afraid to return to their ruined homes.

For reasons that remain largely unclear to this day, Daesh commanders chose to keep the surrounded villagers of Kocho suspended between hope and fear for almost two dreadful weeks.

And on Aug. 15, 2014, 10 years ago this week, hope gave way to horror.

The Yazidis, an ethno-religious minority indigenous to northern Iraq and parts of Syria and Turkiye, had suffered centuries of persecution, but nothing on the scale of what they were about to experience.

The leadership of the so-called caliphate that had been proclaimed two months earlier by Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi regarded the Yazidis as infidels, and in August 2014, their objective was nothing less than genocide.

Thousands of men, women and children would be murdered, their bodies thrown into dozens of hastily dug mass graves scattered across a wide area.

More than 6,000 women and young girls were taken into slavery and subjected to physical and sexual abuse. Ten years on, 2,600 remain missing.

Driven from their homes, survivors sought sanctuary first on the barren heights of Mount Sinjar, where many young children would die from dehydration, and later in the camps for internally displaced persons that sprang up in Iraqi Kurdistan.

Ten years on from the massacres, 200,000 Yazidis remain in those camps, refugees in their own country, unable or afraid to return to their ruined homes.

But in Kocho, a small village 15 km south of Sinjar, things were different — at first.




Daesh fighters attacked the town of Sinjar and the dozens of Yazidi villages scattered to the south of Mount Sinjar in the Nineveh Governorate, Iraq. (AFP)

On the morning of the attack, a unit of the Peshmerga, the army of Iraq’s autonomous Kurdistan Region that was stationed in the village school, fled the village in the face of the Daesh advance. It was a similar story across Sinjar.

A couple hundred residents of Kocho left at the same time as their supposed defenders, hoping to reach the relative safety of Mount Sinjar to the north. Some made it. Others were captured en route.

What happened next reflected one of the lesser-known tragedies of the genocidal attack by Daesh on the Yazidis.

There is a general perception that the Daesh fighters who swept through Sinjar in 2014 were all foreigners, mainly overseas volunteers who had flocked to Syria in answer to Daesh’s murderous call.

In fact, far from being foreigners, or even strangers, many of the Daesh fighters who would commit such terrible crimes against the Yazidis were their neighbors.

“It’s hard to have accurate statistics,” said Natia Navrouzov, a Georgia-born Yazidi and lawyer who headed up Yazda’s legal advocacy efforts and documentation project, gathering evidence of Daesh crimes, and is now the nongovernmental organization’s executive director.

“But in terms of what survivors have described in the testimonies we have collected, they often say that Daesh members came mainly from Al-Ba’aj, which is a region under Sinjar, and then a lot of neighbors joined.”

The town of Al-Ba’aj is barely 20 km to the southwest of Kocho.




The Yazidis, an ethno-religious minority indigenous to northern Iraq and parts of Syria and Turkiye, had suffered centuries of persecution. (AFP)

Although many of the Daesh attackers wore masks, when Yazda was collecting testimonies, “survivors were able to identify them really clearly by name, based on their tribes and on their dialects, because the accent they were speaking with was clearly from a certain tribe or village in Sinjar.

“When it comes to foreign fighters, they were mainly present in Raqqa in Syria, and the Daesh attacks on Yazidis in Sinjar in the first days were really locally led.”

Many of the Yazidis also had economic and social relations with the neighbors who turned against them.

“We have testimonies of survivors who say that even before Aug. 3, they already felt some movement from these neighbors, who were looting their belongings or were watching them.

“Some neighbors even called some of the Yazidi people they knew and liked to tell them, ‘You should go because something’s going to happen.’ But I think the Yazidis just didn’t realize that it would be a genocide; they just thought something political was happening.”

The worst betrayal came at the hands of people who had been intimately involved with Yazidi families.




More than 6,000 women and young girls were taken into slavery and subjected to physical and sexual abuse. (AFP)

“There were social connections,” said Navrouzov. “For example, when a Yazidi child is born, they get an equivalent of the Western godfather, called a ‘kreef.’  The kreef is often an Arab. A lot of Yazidis had these almost family connections with their neighbors, and yet even those people attacked them.”

It should not, said Navrouzov, have come as a great surprise, “because in the past, we have often been attacked by our neighbors,” motivated by enduring misconceptions about the faith of the Yazidis, including that they are devil worshippers — a lie exploited by Daesh propaganda.

Yet even now, “10 years after the genocide, and with all this documentation we have gathered and the advocacy work we and others have done, a lot of people in Iraqi society still think that we are exaggerating, that Daesh did not commit the crimes that we are describing.”

Worse than such denial, “some people still think that what Daesh did was right because the ideology behind it is so deeply rooted in the society.”




Thousands of Iraqis flee from the town of Sinjar. (AFP)

According to some reports, the leader of the Daesh attack on Kocho may have been a local man, initially hesitant to carry out the orders from above. Others think local kreefs may have intervened to try to have the village spared.

Either way, Kocho, uniquely among the 80-plus Yazidi villages in the area that were simply overrun, was subjected to a 12-day siege.

“The devastating thing is that the village was surrounded for about two weeks, from Aug. 3 until Aug. 15,” said Abid Shamdeen, who was studying in the US at the University of Nebraska at the time and helped to mobilize support among the Yazidi diaspora.

“We knew that Daesh had killed the men that they captured on Aug. 3, and that in other villages, they had taken women and children into captivity.

“We were communicating with US officials, with Iraqi officials and Kurdish officials, trying to communicate the message that Daesh will commit a massacre in Kocho. But they didn’t get any help.”

Daesh had first entered the village, delivering its usual ultimatum — convert to Islam or die — on Aug. 3. But over the next 12 days, the Daesh commander, “Abu Hamza,” sat down for a series of negotiations with village leaders, including headman Sheikh Ahmed Jasso.

Whatever the reason for the 12 days of reprieve, on Aug. 15, 2014, the talking ended and the remaining 1,200 inhabitants of Kocho were herded into the village school.

What happened next was described in distressing detail in the book, “The Last Girl — My Story of Captivity and My Fight Against the Islamic State,” by Nadia Murad.

At the school, the men and boys deemed to be adolescents were separated from the women, loaded onto trucks and driven away to be murdered. In all, 600 people died, including six of Murad’s brothers and half-brothers. The women in the school could hear the gunshots that killed their sons, brothers and husbands.

Dozens of older women who were considered too old to be sold as sex slaves were also killed, including Murad’s mother, Shami.




A Yazidi child refugee at Delal Refugee Camp in Zakho. (Getty Images)

The fate that awaited Murad and many other young women from Kocho, including underage girls, was sexual slavery. They were driven to Mosul and sold to Daesh fighters and supporters. In all, an estimated 3,000 Yazidi women were enslaved.

Murad’s ordeal continued until November 2014, when she managed to escape her captor, found her way to a camp for displaced people and from there applied successfully to become a refugee in Germany, where she arrived in 2014.

She went on to found the NGO Nadia’s Initiative and, for her “efforts to end the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war and armed conflict,” in 2018 was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

The dreadful story of the genocidal Daesh attack on the Yazidis, the battle for justice and the search for the missing that continues a decade later, is told in an Arab News Minority Report, published online here.

 

The Yazidi nightmare
Ten years after the genocide, their torment continues

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Palestinian poll finds big drop in support for Oct 7 attack

Updated 3 sec ago
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Palestinian poll finds big drop in support for Oct 7 attack

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Poll suggests 57 percent of Gazans think Oct 7 was incorrect decision

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In previous poll, 57 percent in Gaza saw Oct 7 attack as correct

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Slight dip in Hamas support, but group still most popular

RAMALLAH: A majority of Gazans believe Hamas’ decision to launch the Oct. 7 attack on Israel was incorrect, according to a poll published on Tuesday pointing to a big drop in backing for the assault that prompted Israel’s devastating Gaza offensive.
The poll, conducted in early September by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PSR), found that 57 percent of people surveyed in the Gaza Strip said the decision to launch the offensive was incorrect, while 39 percent said it was correct.
It marked the first time since Oct. 7 that a PSR poll found a majority of Gazan respondents judging the decision as incorrect. It was accompanied by a drop in support for the attack in the West Bank, though a majority of 64 percent of respondents there still thought it was the correct decision, the poll found. PSR’s previous poll, conducted in June, showed that 57 percent of respondents in Gaza thought the decision to be correct.
More than 41,000 Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli military offensive that has laid waste to the Gaza Strip since last October, according to the Gaza health ministry.
Israel launched its assault after the unprecedented Hamas raid which killed 1,200 people and resulted in another 250 being abducted, according to Israeli tallies.
PSR said it surveyed 1,200 people face-to-face, 790 of them in the West Bank and 410 in Gaza, with a 3.5 percent margin of error.
PSR polls since the Oct. 7 attack have consistently shown a majority of respondents in both Gaza and the West Bank to believe the attack was a correct decision, with support generally greater in the West Bank than Gaza.
PSR said the poll released on Tuesday marked the first time since Oct 7. that its findings had shown simultaneously in the West Bank and Gaza a significant drop in the favorability of the attack and in expectations that Hamas will win the current war.
Overall, the poll found a majority of 54 percent of respondents in Gaza and the West Bank thought the decision was correct.
In August, the Israeli military accused Hamas of mounting an effort to falsify the results of PSR polls to falsely show support for Hamas and Oct. 7, though the military said there was no evidence of PSR cooperating with Hamas.
PSR said it had taken the allegation seriously and investigated it. PSR said on Tuesday its analysis of the data did not flag any inconsistencies that would arise when data is arbitrarily altered, and that a review of quality control measures “convinced us that no data manipulation took place.”
Support for Oct. 7 did not necessarily mean support for Hamas or killings or atrocities against civilians, PSR said, adding that “almost 90 percent of the public believes Hamas men did not commit the atrocities depicted in videos taken on that day.”
The poll showed a drop in the number of respondents in Gaza who said they support Hamas to 35 percent from 38 percent. But the Islamist movement remained more popular than Fatah, led by President Mahmoud Abbas, in both in Gaza and the West Bank.

Jordan, Egypt urge end of Israeli hostilities in West Bank

Updated 3 min 40 sec ago
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Jordan, Egypt urge end of Israeli hostilities in West Bank

CAIRO: Jordan’s King Abdullah II and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi expressed their concerns over the continued Israeli attacks against Palestinians in the West Bank, warning of their dangerous consequences.  

The two leaders stressed, during a phone call on Tuesday, the necessity of reaching an immediate and permanent ceasefire in Gaza, as an immediate step that must be taken to protect the security of the region and prevent the expansion of the conflict, according to state-run Petra news agency.

The two leaders reaffirmed their rejection of any attempts to displace Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

King Abdullah also expressed his appreciation for the efforts made by Egypt to reach a comprehensive truce to end the humanitarian catastrophe in the Gaza Strip.

The two leaders stressed the need to continue supporting the Palestinian people in achieving their full legitimate rights and establishing their independent state based on the 1967 borders, with East Jerusalem as its capital.

Meanwhile, Jordan will host a coordination meeting on Wednesday for an Arab-Islamic ministerial committee.

The committee is focused on international efforts to halt the ongoing war on Gaza.


Israel says it thwarted Hezbollah plot to kill former defense official

Updated 17 min 28 sec ago
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Israel says it thwarted Hezbollah plot to kill former defense official

  • The Shin Bet agency did not name the official
  • The attempted attack was similar to a Hezbollah plot foiled in Tel Aviv a year ago

JERUSALEM: Israel’s domestic security agency said on Tuesday that it had foiled a plot by Lebanese militant group Hezbollah to assassinate a former senior defense official in the coming days.
The Shin Bet agency did not name the official. It said in a statement that it had seized an explosive device attached to a remote detonation system, using a mobile phone and a camera, that Hezbollah had planned to operate from Lebanon.
Shin Bet said the attempted attack was similar to a Hezbollah plot foiled in Tel Aviv a year ago, without giving further details.
Israel and Iran-backed Hezbollah have been trading fire across the Lebanese border since October, in the worst escalation of violence there in two decades.


UN General Assembly to debate call for end to Israeli occupation

Updated 47 min 28 sec ago
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UN General Assembly to debate call for end to Israeli occupation

  • The text, which has faced fierce criticism from Israel, is based around an advisory opinion from the International Court of Justice

NEW YORK: UN member states will debate Tuesday a push by the Palestinians to formally demand an end to the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories within 12 months.
The text, which has faced fierce criticism from Israel, is based around an advisory opinion from the International Court of Justice calling Israel’s occupation since 1967 “unlawful.”
“Israel is under an obligation to bring to an end its unlawful presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory as rapidly as possible,” read the opinion, requested by the General Assembly.
In response, Arab countries have called for a special session of the assembly just days before dozens of heads of state and government descend on the UN headquarters this month to address the kick off of this year’s General Assembly session.
“The idea is you want to use the pressure of the international community in the General Assembly and the pressure of the historic ruling by the ICJ to force Israel to change its behavior,” said Palestinian Ambassador to the UN Riyad Mansour, who acknowledged the draft resolution had “shocked many countries.”
The resolution
The draft resolution, due to be voted on late Tuesday or Wednesday, “demands that Israel brings to an end without delay its unlawful presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory,” and that this be done “no later than 12 months from the adoption.”
The first draft text gave only six months.
The draft resolution also “demands” the withdrawal of Israeli forces from the Palestinian territories, a halt to new settlements, the return of seized land and property, and the possibility of return for displaced Palestinians.
A paragraph calling on member states to halt arms exports to Israel disappeared from the draft text during negotiations, however.
“I hope that we will have good numbers,” Mansour said, underlining the “tremendous amount of sympathy and solidarity” with the Palestinians.
While the Security Council is largely paralyzed on the Gaza issue — with the United States repeatedly vetoing censures of its ally Israel — the General Assembly has adopted several texts in support of Palestinian civilians amid the current war.
In May the assembly overwhelmingly supported a largely symbolic resolution on full Palestinian membership of the UN, garnering 143 votes in favor, nine against with 25 abstentions.
The push had previously been vetoed by Washington at the Security Council.
Although General Assembly resolutions are not binding, Israel has already denounced the new text as “disgraceful.”
The resolution’s adoption would be “a reward for terrorism and a message to the world that the barbaric slaughter of children, the rape of women and the kidnapping of innocent civilians is a worthwhile tactic,” said Israel’s UN ambassador Danny Danon.
Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel resulted in the deaths of 1,205 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli official figures.
Militants also seized 251 hostages, 97 of whom are still held in Gaza, including 33 the Israeli military says are dead.
Israel’s offensive has killed at least 41,226 people in Gaza, according to the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry, which does not provide a breakdown of civilian and militant deaths. The UN rights office says most of the dead are women and children.


10 killed in Iran bus crash: state media

Updated 17 September 2024
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10 killed in Iran bus crash: state media

TEHRAN: At least 10 people were killed and dozens injured when bus crashed in central Iran, official media reported on Tuesday.
The bus overturned in Yazd province while traveling between the cities of Bushehr in southwestern Iran and Mashhad in the northeast, state television said.
“The accident left 10 people dead and 41 injured, according to initial figures,” it said, without specifying the total number of passengers on board.
Iran has a poor road safety record, with more than 20,000 deaths in accidents recorded in the year to March, according to the judiciary’s Legal Medicine Organization cited by local media.
Last month, a bus carrying Pakistani pilgrims crashed in central Iran, killing 28 people en route to Iraq for Arbaeen, one of the most significant events in the Shiite Muslim calendar.
Days later, another bus crash killed three people and injured 48 others.