A Decade After Sinjar: Yazidis Missing in Syria

A decade after ISIS launched its genocidal assault on Yazidis in the Sinjar region of northwestern Iraq, its impact—and the struggles of Yazidi survivors for justice—continue to reverberate in Syria. The tenth anniversary of the attack comes amid declining international interest and sympathy, as Yazidis both inside and outside Iraq confront deepening humanitarian, legal, and political barriers to recovery. Among the legacies of the genocide is the thousands of missing Yazidi women and children whom ISIS abducted in Iraq and took to Syria. On this issue, however, there remain opportunities for rights organizations, advocacy groups, and survivor networks to make progress.

Prospects for meaningful justice on the Yazidi file have dimmed in the last several years. The initial optimism and hope that accompanied the Iraqi government’s passage of a Yazidi Survivors Law in 2021 faded, for example, as compensation payments to survivors and families of victims failed to materialize. In the absence of political will for an international or hybrid tribunal that would better encompass the full range of crimes that Yazidis endured, summary counterterrorism trials in Iraq have often only enabled more abuses. Most recently, the premature end to the UNITAD mandate has left Yazidi communities worried that its trove of evidence will be forgotten and neglected while post-ISIS justice processes stall further. Day-to-day survival has become the most pressing concern for many of the 200,000 Iraqi Yazidis who were displaced in 2014 and face expulsion from IDP camps in Iraq and deportation from Europe, with no way to return to the Sinjar region that remains largely destroyed. These negative developments have occurred against the backdrop of a steady renewal of ISIS attacks in Iraq and Syria as the organization threatens to reconstitute itself.

Given these difficulties, it is worth underlining the efforts that Yazidi families have made to search for loved ones who went missing in Syria. The exact scale of Yazidi abductions and transfers to Syria (as opposed to within Iraq), remains unclear, but by mid-2016 there were still at least 3,200 Yazidi women and children reportedly living in ISIS captivity in Syria; this represented about half of all Yazidis whom ISIS abducted in the August 2014 assault on Sinjar. By early 2021, local Syrian civil society organizations like al-Beit al-Yazidi in Hasakeh governorate had reportedly helped repatriate over 700 Iraqi Yazidis. Returnees include those who had been held in formal detention facilities like Al Hol Camp, as well as those living in private residences under varying degrees of compulsion. Their identification and return from Syria are a testament to the resilience and resourcefulness of the Yazidi community, in the face of immense challenges.

On the other hand, such community-driven efforts are proceeding ad hoc and with little formal support or cross-border coordination. An estimated 2,763 Yazidis remain missing, with many likely to be in Syria. At Al Hol Camp, the identities of the many Yazidi women—who often fear reprisals and separation from their children—are still unknown to SDF and camp authorities, humanitarian NGOs, and their families. Likewise, young Yazidi men whom ISIS had kidnapped and brainwashed as children are hesitant to contact family members, at times out of fear of communal rejection; and hence they remain stranded and stateless across northern Syria. Finally, although it is known that at least dozens of Yazidi women died while in detention in Syria, the search for their remains has not begun in earnest. Some of these may have been commingled with the remains of Syrians also killed by ISIS or Global Coalition airstrikes, and later unknowingly exhumed by the Syrian Missing Persons and Forensic Team or local first responders. Investing time and resources in the identification for these remains would therefore not only aid Yazidi families desperate to know the fate and whereabouts of their loved ones; it would also enhance the wider search for the ISIS missing in Syria, which remains one of the few files where CSOs and NGOs have the opportunity to achieve tangible results

Recently SJAC has been expanding its efforts on the search for Yazidis missing in Syria. For several years SJAC has been documenting the crimes that Yazidi women endured in Syria as part of its missing persons program, but in recent months it has begun interviewing survivors specifically to identify patterns in Yazidi movement within Syria and the likely locations of victims’ remains. The search for the Yazidi missing presents new challenges and requires a different investigative approach. For example, because many Yazidi women and girls were trafficked between individuals, new methods are required to track individual cases of movement between private residences rather than between the large-scale ISIS prison facilities that SJAC is accustomed to documenting. Although SJAC hopes to identify the whereabouts of Yazidis who remain alive in Syria, in such cases awareness-raising and advocacy campaigns may be necessary to ensure that families and survivor networks are aware of and able to receive these individuals.

In other instances, SJAC plans to search for specific Yazidi women who reportedly died in ISIS captivity in Syria; and these, too, raise unique challenges. Some Yazidis who died in Syria were allegedly buried in single graves, which will require different techniques to identify as compared with the mass graves common to ISIS disappearances generally. Investigations are made more difficult because evidence is scattered on either side of the Syrian-Iraqi border. Entities such as UNITAD, which likely holds extensive information relevant to Yazidis in Syria, have been unable to share with organizations in Syria. Any potential exhumations, DNA testing, and return of remains will require much greater coordination than has so far obtained between government authorities, local CSOs, and international NGOs working on either side of the Iraq-Syria border.

Despite these challenges and recent setbacks, a decade on from the genocidal assault on Sinjar, a focus on the missing in Syria indicates that there is still room for progress in supporting Yazidi survivors in their pursuit of justice.

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