First stop: After fleeing from violence and kidnappings in Sinjar, an Ezidi girl sits crying in her new home - a classroom in Zakho. | Photo: Matthew Barber
First stop: After fleeing from violence and kidnappings in Sinjar, an Ezidi girl sits crying in her new home – a classroom in Zakho. | Photo: Matthew Barber

Houston, TX – Sinjar Crisis Management Team (SCMT) is a group of volunteers that have taken a leading role in following the situation of kidnapped Yezidi civilians who were abducted by the Islamic State (ISIL) after the assault on the Yezidi homeland of Sinjar that began Aug. 3rd of this year. As part of a slavery revival program, ISIL rounded up several thousand Yezidis and detained them at specific locations. The majority of these abductees are women and girls that ISIL has been gradually distributing to jihadist fighters as concubines or sex slaves. SCMT has spearheaded advocacy efforts, engaging the US, Iraqi, and Kurdish governments to push for action to free the kidnapped Yezidis. Part of this effort is has involved monitoring the detention sites where abductees have been kept by ISIL and the status of the abductees in those sites. As many as 7,000 Yezidis, the majority of which are women, have been held at a number of sites in northern Iraq. Each site varies in the level of difficulty that it would pose for a rescue operation attempting to free its population of kidnapped Yezidis.

During the ISIL assault on the Sinjar area in August, the village of Kocho experienced an incident of mass execution when 412 captured male Yezidis of the town were massacred on Aug. 15th. After the extermination, ISIL used Kocho as a holding site for female abductees, as well as males that have been spared by professing conversion to Islam. Some female abductees were taken from Kocho and held in other locations to be used sexually by jihadist fighters that would frequent them; others who tried to escape Kocho have been killed.

Of all sites where Yezidi abductees have been held, the Kocho site would have been the least strategically difficult location at which a rescue operation could be conducted, due to its proximity to the Sinjar Mountain where volunteer Yezidi forces still hold some areas. Our last estimate was that 757 kidnapped Yezidis were being held there. Unfortunately, the opportunity to rescue abductees from Kocho has now passed, as ISIL fighters today transferred the kidnapped to Tel Afar (Nov. 25). All unmarried girls were separated from their families and taken to an unknown location.

This was not the first transfer to have occurred recently. SCMT noted with alarm that another site with significant potential for a rescue operation was emptied of its abductees by ISIL forces that moved many of the women into Syria, where an extraction operation would be nearly impossible to conduct.

SCMT and other Yezidis have been advocating for action to free the thousands of kidnapped Yezidis for over two months. Despite an involved campaign to prompt action on this urgent problem, as well as warnings that the window of opportunity was closing as abductees were being transferred to less-penetrable areas, no action has been taken and we are now witnessing the loss of our chance to save them.

In the last few days, Kurdish and Iraqi forces collaborated to retake Jalawla and Saadiya. Though efforts are made to protect such strategic areas, thousands of kidnapped Yezidis who are victims of the worst slavery project of recent history—in an area with less valuable resource potential—have been abandoned and continue to experience the reality of being third-class citizens.

Murad Ismael and Matthew Barber
Sinjar Crisis Management Team

Contact: Murad Ismael
(832) 638-4348
sinjar.crisis@gmail.com