Yazidis

Overview

The Yazidis are a distinct religious community rooted in northern Iraq. Their historic communities include Sinjar, areas near Mosul and the Nineveh Plains, within the wider landscape of Mesopotamia. Yazidis also live in the Kurdistan Region, where many displaced families sought refuge after 2014. Lalish is their principal holy site. Sinjar, long a center of Yazidi life, became the site of the Islamic State’s genocidal assault on August 3, 2014. The attack and its aftermath remain central to the community’s efforts to secure justice, recover missing relatives and return home.

Yazidism is a religion separate from Islam. Yazidis hold differing views of their ethnic identity: many identify as ethnically Kurdish, while others regard Yazidis as distinct from Muslim Kurds in both religion and ethnicity. Iraq’s former government classified Yazidis as Arabs without historical basis, overriding those varied identities. Religious identity and personal self-identification, rather than an imposed state designation, are essential to understanding the community. Before the 2014 assault, approximately 550,000 Yazidis lived in Iraq. Subsequent killings, captivity, flight and emigration sharply changed their circumstances; an estimate published after the genocide said about 100,000 had left the country.

The Yazidi genocide involved mass murder, abduction and sexual enslavement. The Sinjar massacre was part of the Islamic State’s broader campaign against Yazidis during its offensive in northern Iraq. Survival depended on escape routes, military intervention and aid from other communities, but the end of Islamic State rule in Sinjar did not restore destroyed homes or resolve the fate of missing captives. Yazidi representatives have therefore sought protection, compensation, prosecution of perpetrators and security arrangements that allow families to live safely in their historic communities.

Origins

Yazidi communal life developed in northern Iraq, with Sinjar and Lalish among its most important centers. Lalish remains a place of religious gathering and pilgrimage. In 2005, security concerns led many Yazidis to observe the Lalish pilgrimage in local houses of worship instead of traveling to the holy site. That disruption illustrates how threats to movement can affect religious life even when a community retains its places of worship.

Yazidis’ varied understandings of ethnicity have shaped their place in Iraqi politics. Many share Kurdish language and cultural ties and identify as Kurdish. Others emphasize an ethnic identity distinct from that of Muslim Kurds. Neither view makes Yazidism a branch of Islam. Under Iraq’s former government, official designation of Yazidis as Arabs disregarded these identities. State policy also restricted religious freedom: reports from the period before the 2003 invasion recorded that Iraq’s interim constitution did not recognize Yazidis alongside several other minority communities. Recognition of Yazidis as a distinct religious community is consequently tied to their ability to maintain their institutions and represent themselves.

History

Yazidis endured repeated persecution before the Islamic State’s rise, including Ottoman-era massacres. Under Saddam Hussein’s government, state treatment of Yazidis reflected both coercion and disregard for their self-identification. During the 1988–89 Anfal campaign, Iraq formed all-Yazidi military detachments to pursue and attack Muslim Kurds. Thirty-three Yazidis from Mosul were arrested in July 1996 and remained unaccounted for in a 2001 religious-freedom report. These episodes form part of a longer history in which Yazidis faced danger from authorities and armed movements while trying to sustain their own communities.

Violence continued after the fall of Saddam Hussein’s government. Yazidis were targeted in a wave of bombings in 2007 during the Iraqi insurgency. Security fears also disrupted travel and religious observance. In the Kurdistan Region, Yazidi representatives participated in public institutions: its Council of Ministers included two prominent Yazidi ministers without portfolio during the 2010 reporting period. Kurdistan’s parliament created departments for seven religious minorities, including Yazidis and Jews, in May 2015. Such representation mattered, but it could not substitute for protection where families lived.

The Islamic State’s advance through northern Iraq in 2014 brought a catastrophe of a different scale. Its offensive against minorities around Mosul and the Nineveh Plains preceded the invasion of Sinjar. Thousands of Peshmerga withdrew without resistance when Islamic State fighters entered Sinjar on August 3, leaving Yazidi residents exposed. Fighters then separated and killed captives, abducted women and children, and sold many into slavery. More than 5,000 Yazidis were massacred in the invasion and its aftermath. The organization killed Yazidis who refused to convert to Islam as part of its effort to destroy their religion.

Tens of thousands fled to Mount Sinjar, where trapped families lacked food, water and medical care. After the Peshmerga withdrawal, Kurdistan Workers’ Party fighters, commonly identified by the abbreviation PKK, established a defense line on the mountain and opened a corridor for fleeing Yazidis. They moved people toward camps in Syria and mountainous areas north of Sinjar. United States airstrikes against Islamic State positions around Mount Sinjar enabled more than 20,000 people to escape on August 8–10, 2014. In mid-December, Peshmerga aided by further American airstrikes broke the siege; Masoud Barzani announced that Kurdish fighters had opened another corridor for people trapped there. These operations relieved immediate danger without ending captivity or displacement.

Following its intervention, the PKK gained a foothold in Sinjar and organized Yazidi volunteers into local defense forces, including the Sinjar Resistance Units and Sinjar Women’s Units. The Kurdistan Democratic Party assembled hundreds of Yazidis into a Peshmerga coalition commanded by Qasim Shesho. In January 2015, the Kurdistan Regional Government authorized survivor Khatoon Khider to establish an all-female Yazidi Peshmerga battalion, which she commanded as the Force of the Sun Ladies Brigade. In 2016, 127 Yazidi Kurdish women completed a 45-day basic training course at a Peshmerga Tiger base near Zakho. These formations reflected both the community’s determination to defend itself and the competing political structures within which Yazidis had to operate.

International Coalition, Iraqi army and Peshmerga forces cleared Islamic State fighters from Sinjar by November 2015. Yazidi Sinjar Resistance Units also took part in its liberation. The discovery of mass graves exposed the scale of the killings: by the end of 2019, investigators had found 81 graves containing more than 2,500 Yazidis across Sinjar district and other predominantly Yazidi areas of Nineveh. Iraqi authorities began exhuming a grave at Kocho in 2019, the first such exhumation in Sinjar district. Recovering and identifying victims was essential for families seeking answers and for efforts to prosecute the crimes.

Persecution and survival

Captivity continued long after the loss of Sinjar. Islamic State fighters held hundreds of Yazidi women and children in Raqqa and sexually assaulted many of them. A United Nations inquiry reported in June 2016 that more than 3,200 Yazidi women and children remained enslaved. Survivors described repeated sales into sexual slavery and separation from their families. Samia Sleman, abducted as a teenager, endured more than six months of captivity before escaping Iraq. At age 15, she received the American Jewish Committee’s Voice of Conscience Award for advocating international recognition of the genocide. Her advocacy joined broader Yazidi demands to rescue those still held and punish perpetrators.

Vian Dakhil, a Yazidi member of Iraq’s parliament, brought global attention to the crisis through her August 2014 parliamentary address. She pressed for international recognition of the genocide, protection for Yazidis and humanitarian assistance for those who escaped. The American Jewish Committee later honored her with its Moral Courage Award. Yazidi advocates also sought a special tribunal to prosecute perpetrators of the Sinjar genocide. Formal recognition identified the crime, but accountability requires investigations, prosecutions and support for people whose families and communities were destroyed.

Rescue and care developed through government offices and humanitarian work. As Kurdistan Regional Government prime minister, Barzani established an office to rescue Yazidis held by the Islamic State; by August 2018, it had spent more than $10 million on rescue efforts. The Kurdistan Regional Government maintained a center in Duhok that treated and supported women who survived captivity and documented rape. Survivors, including women and children, continued to need psychological, medical and economic support. Iraq opened a Survivors’ Directorate branch in Sinjar in August 2022 to support people affected by the genocide. Missing captives and uncompensated losses remained urgent concerns years after the Islamic State’s defeat.

Israeli humanitarian organization IsraAID assisted Yazidis and other refugees in northern Iraq, as well as Yazidi refugees resettled in Germany. In September 2014, a grant from the American Jewish Committee helped IsraAID aid Christian and Yazidi families who had fled the Islamic State to the Kurdistan Region. A further grant in 2015 supported the distribution of blankets, mattresses and clothing before winter. This assistance addressed immediate needs among people who had escaped violence but still faced difficult conditions in displacement camps.

Yazidis’ experience also informed discussion of how minority communities could survive in Iraq. The Islamic State’s genocidal campaign renewed proposals for autonomous provinces for Yazidis in Sinjar, Christians in the Nineveh Plains and Turkmens in Tel Afar. For families who wished to remain, proposals for local self-government were bound to the practical questions of protection, restored services and reconstruction. Emigration reduced the population of historic communities; insecure return exposed families to armed coercion and renewed flight. Yazidi survival therefore depended on both individual care and conditions that allowed communal life to continue at home.

Religion and culture

Yazidism gives the community a religious identity distinct from those of its Muslim and Christian neighbors. Lalish Temple is central to Yazidi religious life and has been identified in heritage-preservation efforts alongside Mosul’s Christian churches and monasteries as a site requiring restoration. Protection of such places concerns more than buildings: access to worship, pilgrimage and communal gatherings enables Yazidis to pass on practices across generations. The security concerns that altered Lalish pilgrimage in 2005 showed how violence could interrupt those practices without destroying the site itself.

Ethnic diversity within the community does not diminish its shared religious identity. Many Yazidis identify with the Kurds; others define themselves separately from Muslim Kurds. Religious freedom requires that neither position be imposed on all Yazidis. During a visit to Erbil and Lalish in August 2016, a United States special adviser met political, security and religious leaders, commemorated the anniversary of the genocide’s beginning and emphasized protection for minority communities. Such protection rests on Yazidis’ rights and safety as Yazidis, without recasting Yazidism as Islam or assigning the community an ethnicity by government decree.

Relations with neighbors have included acts of help as well as hostility. During riots in Zakho and Duhok, Muslim business owners refused to identify Christian establishments and helped Christian and Yazidi neighbors escape burning buildings. At the same time, anti-Yazidi rhetoric circulated on social media while legal deterrents remained scarce. These experiences underscore the difference between the conduct of particular people and threats directed at an entire religious community. Sustaining Yazidi culture requires freedom of worship, security in daily life and the ability to preserve sites associated with communal memory.

Present day

Sinjar’s liberation in 2015 did not end the Yazidi crisis. Thousands of displaced people remained in camps in the Kurdistan Region, where conditions could be severe and assistance inadequate. Families returning to Sinjar encountered damaged infrastructure, limited basic services and uncertainty over control of their neighborhoods and property. Nine years after the genocide, many still lacked their homes and land and had received no material compensation. Survivors also faced the continuing absence of relatives abducted in 2014. Safe return required housing and services alongside physical protection.

Control of Sinjar became a contest among Iraqi authorities, the Kurdistan Democratic Party, PKK-linked groups and the Popular Mobilization Forces. In 2019, the Popular Mobilization Forces’ Imam Ali Brigade blocked Sinjar’s Yazidi district council and mayor from returning to the city. The forces also included locally recruited minority units. A Yazidi formation known as the Lalish regiment operated in south Sinjar; Fawj Lalish, identified as the 36th Popular Mobilization Forces Brigade, included local Yazidis and Shia Turkmens. Brigade 80 formed in 2021 from elements of the Sinjar Resistance Units, including Yazidi special forces. The presence of Yazidis in different formations did not resolve disputes over command or local authority.

Baghdad and Erbil ratified the Sinjar agreement in October 2020 to restore security and stability to the district. Its goals confronted armed rivalry on the ground. Turkish threats of military action prompted the Popular Mobilization Forces to send three brigades into Sinjar and establish bases on Mount Sinjar. PKK affiliates and Popular Mobilization Forces militias, together with Turkish airstrikes, hindered return in 2022. That year, Sinjar Resistance Units clashed with the Iraqi Army. Yazidi political representatives also reported religiously based restrictions at Peshmerga-controlled checkpoints while traveling from Baghdad to their communities. Each source of insecurity affected families deciding whether they could return and remain.

Violence and coercion by armed actors continued to shape Yazidi concerns beyond the main battlefront. A local resident reported that PKK members kidnapped a Yazidi teenager from Sinjar and took him to the Qandil Mountains for fighter training; he returned to his family on April 9, 2022, after two months in captivity. In May 2022, Kurdistan Region security officials accused four Yazidi suspects of smuggling rockets intended for a political office, dams and electricity facilities; at least one displacement camp housing suspects had been used to hide rockets. These incidents illustrate the pressures armed competition placed on civilians and displaced communities.

By the genocide’s ninth anniversary, Yazidis in Sinjar still feared renewed fighting among groups seeking influence. Turkish-supported armed factions had also committed abuses in and around Afrin, including torture, rape, looting and seizure of private property, particularly in Kurdish and Yazidi areas. Regional conflict thus affected Yazidi security beyond Sinjar itself. In September 2026, the Iraqi prime minister’s office announced that the Sinjar Resistance Units had agreed to disarm and that qualified members would enter Iraqi security institutions. The announced arrangement was part of efforts to stabilize the area around Mount Sinjar and enable displaced residents to return.

Recovery remains a long process for survivors and their families. It includes identifying victims in mass graves, locating missing captives, providing sustained medical and psychological care, compensating losses and rebuilding homes, roads and services. It also requires security arrangements accountable to residents, so return does not place families between competing armed forces. The genocide destroyed lives and villages, but Yazidi advocates, rescuers and local defenders have continued to press for justice and the survival of their community in Sinjar and elsewhere in Iraq.