Kristian Skeie

Yazidis: Life After Genocide. Kristian Skeie January 2017.

“On August 3, 2014, ISIS fighters armed with heavy weapons after they conquered
Mosul two months earlier, coming from Ba’aj attacked the Yazidi villages of Girzarek and
Siba Sheikh Khidir. Peshmerga forces received orders from Erbil and withdrew. They did
not evacuate the Yazidi civilian population, leaving them defenceless, at the mercy of ISIS.
Local Yazidi resistance armed with light weapons collapsed after four hours; they did not
have enough ammunition, nor heavy arms to resists against jihadi armoured vehicles. In a
few hours ISIS entered the town of Sinjar. The local population in panic escaped to the
mountain. ISIS captured those who could not escape: men were forced to convert to Islam;
those who refused were killed on the spot. More than 35 mass graves have been found
this far. ISIS revived open sex slave markets, a tradition that had disappeared from the
region since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Over 5240 women and girls were
captured and sold as slaves”. Vicken Cheterian.

In June 2016, 6 months after Sinjar was liberated from ISIS, I travelled to the Sinjar
region of Kurdistan Iraq with journalist Vicken Cheterian. We wanted to see for our selves what the
situation is like for the Yazidi population, 6 months after the liberation of the city of Sinjar. We both are adjunct faculty members at Webster University in Geneva and were given a small research grant in order to pursue this project. It follows the work I have done in Bosnia (Srebrenica) and in Rwanda about the lives of people who survived genocide. Cheterian has over the past few years done research about the Armenian genocide as well as currently working on a longer research topic of “Why the extreme violence in the the Middle East”.

Cheterian had already done much work win Syria, Lebanon (He is Lebanese and speaks Arabic), Turkey, Iraq and Yemen as well as in Russia and the Caucasus. We designed a trip around the Yazidi population. They are the group of people who has possibly suffered the most with the raise of ISIS/ Daesh in the region in and around northern Iraq. We also did work on the Assyrians as well as visiting Halabja, the town where Saddam Hussain gassed and killed over 5000 people in 1988. We met with Survivors in this region around Sulaimani, near the Iranian boarder. We also met with
religious minorities, like the Kakais, a small religious minority. Again, the idea was to understand better how the minorities in the region organise themselves and continues to survive despite constant violent oppression towards many of these minorities and to further understand where the history of the problems in Iraq are coming from. Of course, this is a large topic and I very much consider this as “work in progress” and a continuation of my previous work on similar topics in Bosnia and Rwanda. I see this work to continue and likely so also in Switzerland amongst immigrant communities.

The work has been presented in several conferences and will be exhibited as part
of the Humanitarian Film Festival and Forum in Geneva (FIFDH) in March 2017. Part of this story has been published in Global Geneva, a new publication which focuses on independent reporting. It was founded by Edward Girardet and is planning to publish approximately 6 issues per year.

My hope is to revisit the Yazidi people again in the near future and follow up their
stories in a similar fashion to the work I have done in Bosnia as well as in Rwanda. I have
started it already by working with immigrant communities here in Geneva and am planning
to visit refugees currently living in Germany whose families I visited in the Sinjar region. I
believe this long term approach has a value and the continuation will create a “visual diary”
of the evolution within the communities where I am working.