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

Special 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

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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The UN will vote on a Palestinian resolution demanding Israel end its occupation

The UN will vote on a Palestinian resolution demanding Israel end its occupation
Updated 51 min 41 sec ago
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The UN will vote on a Palestinian resolution demanding Israel end its occupation

The UN will vote on a Palestinian resolution demanding Israel end its occupation
  • The resolution is being put to a vote in the 193-member assembly as Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza approaches its first anniversary

UNITED NATIONS: The UN General Assembly will vote Wednesday on a Palestinian resolution demanding that Israel end its “unlawful presence” in Gaza and the occupied West Bank within a year, withdraw its military forces and evacuate all settlers.
The resolution is being put to a vote in the 193-member assembly as Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza approaches its first anniversary and as violence in the West Bank reaches new highs. The war was triggered by Hamas attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7.
Riyad Mansour, the Palestinian UN ambassador, opened the assembly meeting Tuesday by saying Palestinians face an “existential threat” and claiming Israel has held them “in shackles.” He demanded an end to Israel’s decades-long occupation and for Palestinians to be able to return home to live in peace and freedom.
Israel’s ambassador to the UN, Danny Danon, urged member nations to reject the resolution, describing it as “an attempt to destroy Israel through diplomatic terrorism” that never mentions Hamas’ atrocities and “ignores the truth, twists the facts and replaces reality with fiction.”
“Instead of a resolution condemning the rape and massacre committed by Hamas on Oct. 7, we gather here to watch the Palestinians’ UN circus — a circus where evil is righteous, war is peace, murder is justified and terror is applauded,” he said.
If adopted, the resolution would not be legally binding, but the extent of its support would reflect world opinion. There are no vetoes in the General Assembly, unlike in the 15-member Security Council.
The resolution is a response to a ruling by the top United Nations court in July that said Israel’s presence in the Palestinian territories is unlawful and must end.
In the sweeping condemnation of Israel’s rule over the lands it captured during the 1967 war, the International Court of Justice said Israel had no right to sovereignty over the Palestinian territories and was violating international laws against acquiring the lands by force.
The court’s opinion also is not legally binding. Nonetheless, the Palestinians drafted the resolution to try to implement the ruling, saying Israel’s “abuse of its status as the occupying power” renders its “presence in the occupied Palestinian territory unlawful.”
Mansour stressed that any country that thinks the Palestinian people “will accept a life of servitude” or that claims peace is possible without a just solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is “not being realistic.”
The solution remains an independent Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders, with East Jerusalem as its capital, living side by side in peace and security with Israel, he said.
US Ambassador to the UN Linda Thomas Greenfield told reporters that the resolution has “a significant number of flaws,” saying it goes beyond the ICJ ruling. It also doesn’t recognize that “Hamas is a terrorist organization” in control of Gaza and that Israel has a right to defend itself, she said.
“In our view, the resolution does not bring about tangible benefits across the board for the Palestinian people,” Thomas-Greenfield said. “I think it could complicate the situation on the ground, complicate what we’re trying to do to end the conflict, and I think it impedes reinvigorating steps toward a two-state solution.”
The resolution calls for Israel to pay reparations to Palestinians for the damage caused by its occupation and urges countries to take steps to prevent trade or investments that maintain Israel’s presence in the territories.
It also demands that Israel be held accountable for any violations of international law, that sanctions be imposed on those responsible for maintaining Israel’s presence in the territories, and for countries to halt arms exports to Israel if they’re suspected of being used there.
Mansour said an initial Palestinian draft demanded Israel end its occupation within six months but that it was revised in response to concerns of some countries to increase the time frame to within a year.
Most likely, he said, Israel won’t pay attention to the resolution.


Israeli military says four soldiers killed in southern Gaza

Israeli military says four soldiers killed in southern Gaza
Updated 50 min 12 sec ago
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Israeli military says four soldiers killed in southern Gaza

Israeli military says four soldiers killed in southern Gaza

JERUSALEM: The Israeli military said on Wednesday four soldiers were killed in combat in southern Gaza.
Three soldiers were severely wounded and two others moderately wounded in the same incident, it said.


Blinken arrives in Egypt to push Gaza ceasefire

Blinken arrives in Egypt to push Gaza ceasefire
Updated 18 September 2024
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Blinken arrives in Egypt to push Gaza ceasefire

Blinken arrives in Egypt to push Gaza ceasefire
  • On his 10th trip to the Middle East since the start of the war in Gaza nearly a year ago, Blinken will address negotiation efforts with Egyptian officials
  • Blinken is expected to meet with Egyptian leader Abdel Fattah El-Sisi and hold a press conference with Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty

CAIRO: US Secretary of State Antony Blinken landed in Cairo early Wednesday, an AFP reporter said, as efforts to secure an elusive ceasefire in Gaza were further complicated by a wave of blasts in Lebanon.
On his 10th trip to the Middle East since the start of the war in Gaza nearly a year ago, Blinken will address negotiation efforts with Egyptian officials, according to the US State Department.
Blinken is expected to meet with Egyptian leader Abdel Fattah El-Sisi and hold a press conference with Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty, but will not be visiting Israel in this round of diplomacy.
US officials say privately that they do not expect any breakthroughs at Wednesday’s talks in Cairo, but Blinken’s visit will aim to keep up the pressure campaign for a deal between Israel and Hamas.
“He’ll be meeting with Egyptian officials about a number of things, but squarely on the agenda is how we get a proposal that we think would secure agreement from both parties,” said US State Department spokesman Matthew Miller.
His visit comes after a series of pagers used by Hezbollah members exploded across Lebanon on Tuesday, killing at least nine people and wounding about 2,800 in blasts the Iran-backed militant group blamed on Israel.
The United States was “not involved” and “not aware of this incident in advance,” according to Miller.
Israel recently announced it was broadening the aims of the war sparked by Hamas’s October 7 attacks to include its fight against Hezbollah along the country’s border with Lebanon.


Gold Apollo says it did not make pagers used in Lebanon explosion

Gold Apollo says it did not make pagers used in Lebanon explosion
Updated 18 September 2024
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Gold Apollo says it did not make pagers used in Lebanon explosion

Gold Apollo says it did not make pagers used in Lebanon explosion
  • The company’s founder said the pagers used in the explosion were made by a company in Europe that had the right to use the Taiwanese firm’s brand

TAIPEI: Taiwan’s Gold Apollo did not make the pagers that were used in the detonations in Lebanon on Tuesday, the company’s founder Hsu Ching-Kuang told reporters on Wednesday.

At least nine people were killed and nearly 3,000 wounded when pagers used by Hezbollah members detonated simultaneously across Lebanon on Tuesday.

Images of destroyed pagers analyzed by Reuters showed a format and stickers on the back that were consistent with pagers made by Gold Apollo.

Hsu said the pagers used in the explosion were made by a company in Europe that had the right to use the Taiwanese firm’s brand.
 


Biden calls on Sudan’s warring parties to re-engage in negotiations

Biden calls on Sudan’s warring parties to re-engage in negotiations
Updated 18 September 2024
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Biden calls on Sudan’s warring parties to re-engage in negotiations

Biden calls on Sudan’s warring parties to re-engage in negotiations
  • “We call for all parties to this conflict to end this violence and refrain from fueling it, for the future of Sudan and for all of the Sudanese people,” Biden said in a statement

WASHINGTON: US President Joe Biden on Tuesday called on Sudan’s warring parties to re-engage in negotiations to end a war that has been ongoing for more than 17 months.
“We call for all parties to this conflict to end this violence and refrain from fueling it, for the future of Sudan and for all of the Sudanese people,” Biden said in a statement.
“I call on the belligerents responsible for Sudanese suffering— the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF)— to pull back their forces, facilitate unhindered humanitarian access, and re-engage in negotiations to end this war.”
More than 12,00 people have been killed across Sudan since the war started on April 15, 2023.
The conflict began when competition between Sudan’s army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), which had previously shared power after staging a coup, flared into open warfare.
Biden said the RSF’s assault is disproportionately harming Sudanese civilians and called on the armed forces to stop “indiscriminate” bombings that are destroying civilian lives and infrastructure.
The US previously determined that the two sides committed war crimes and sanctioned 16 individuals and entities tied to the war.
Biden said the United States will continue to evaluate further atrocity allegations and potential additional sanctions.