KOJO, Iraq – They have been waiting for years to bury the remains of their husbands, sons and brothers. The Yazidi women rock fresh ground shrouded in Iraqi flags, calling as if their loved ones can still hear it.
On Saturday, the remains of 103 victims, members of the Yazidi ethnic minority group, were brought back to the village, where ISIS had gathered and shot seven years earlier and dumped their bodies in mass graves. The massacre became synonymous with the group’s campaign of genocide against the small religious minority.
Iraqi and international investigators have unearthed the remains – including another body returned elsewhere in the Sinjar district in northern Iraq – and identified them through DNA tests.
The grueling, day-long ceremony to bury the 103 victims in Kojo was a stark reminder of the damage ISIS inflicted on the Yazidis, a 2014 tragedy exacerbated by years of government neglect.
ISIS has killed up to 10,000 Yazidis and captured more than 6,000, most of them women and children, in what the United Nations and Congress have called a genocide campaign against the ancient group and other religious minorities in Iraq.
After the ordinary wooden coffins are buried in Kojo on Saturday, family members throw themselves at the graves, with women tearing at their hair, screaming in anguish and calling out to their loved ones in a crescendo of mixed sadness that can be heard far beyond the edge. of the now deserted village. Volunteers stood with carts to take those who fainted to a mobile clinic.
The mourning was intensified by the collective grief over the loss of an entire community, where almost all the men and older boys were killed. Saturday’s ceremony is expected to be repeated as the United Nations and other organizations comb through dozens of mass graves that have yet to be excavated.
“Oh my brother, my little heart!” calls a woman. Another one, doubled by grief, remembers the new clothes her husband bought a few days before he was taken away and killed.
“My brother is a pretty tall man, this grave is too short for him,” another woman sobbed.
Other graves remained unattended, and the entire family of the victims was killed or missing.
The massacre took place three months after the Islamic State seized the northern Iraqi city of Mosul in 2014 and declared it the capital of its self-proclaimed caliphate. The ISIS fighters surrounded Kojo, a farming village a few kilometers from Sinjarberg. Some fighters were from neighboring Arab Muslim villages with which the Yazidis had been friends for years.
On that sweltering hot day in August, the fighters ordered everyone in town to gather at the local school – the women and children on the second floor and the men on the first floor. Many of the women and children heard the gunshots that killed their relatives.
The fighters separated women they considered too old to be desirable and shot them in a neighboring city, forcing the rest of the women and many of the girls into sexual slavery.
It took almost three years before Iraqi-backed Iraqi troops drove ISIS out of Iraq, and another two years before the United States and Syrian Kurdish armies retook the last ISIS area in Syria. More than 2,000 Yazidis are still missing.
Most of the Yazidis from Sinjar, the group’s traditional homeland, now live in camps for displaced people in the Kurdistan region of Iraq and are waiting in severe poverty for their homes and villages to be rebuilt. A recent wave of suicides among young Yazidis speaks of the despair facing a community shattered by the ISIS massacre and the subsequent government neglect.
Aid agencies say the area where the Yazidis live is still littered with ISIS-era explosives, which are controlled by armed groups and torn apart by divisions among the Yazidis themselves.
The remains returned Saturday included two brothers of Nobel laureate Nadia Murad, who survived slavery through ISIS.
While family members stand in line to transport the long line of coffins to Kojo, Mrs. Murad takes her place on the muddy road next to the coffin of one of her brothers. Another brother, Huzny, helped carry the coffin with one arm, and Mrs. Murad surrounded with the others.
“We’re trying to deceive ourselves into thinking it could not really go on with life,” she said. Murad said.
But it was a day to remember. Relatives of the victims, their shoes stuck in the cold mud and their faces sad, carry the coffins into the city on the long hike and hand them over to an Iraqi guard of honor.
“Today is a message to the whole world that the Iraqi government cannot protect its minorities,” said Sheikh Naif Jasso, who was waiting to receive the coffins of his brother, the former mayor, and the rest of the victims. . transport from a nearby military base.
Mr. Jasso said this also applies to the regional government in Kurdistan, which was responsible for security in Sinjar until Iraqi government forces regained control in 2017.
Although the regional government has given refuge to Yazidis displaced from their homes, most Yazidis nonetheless feel betrayed by the Kurdish pesh merga forces and say they have encouraged villagers to stay by promising to protect them from ISIS.
Instead, when confronted by the looming onslaught of ISIS, the Kurdish forces withdrew without warning into what their commanders called a ‘tactical retreat’, causing the Yazidis to have massacres.
Mrs. Murad and others fear that the neglect of the Yazidi homeland is just over with what ISIS has begun.
“There are some clear signs that this community may disappear from their homeland and Iraq,” she said.
“More than 100,000 Yazidis have emigrated since 2014,” she added. “There are whole communities, villages in Sinjar that are being destroyed or abandoned.”
Most Yazidis have relocated to Germany, Canada and Australia. While the United States has helped finance Yazidis in Iraq – through, for example, aid for camps, construction projects, and investigations into ISIS crimes – the Trump administration has taken very little of Yazidis.
Saturday’s funeral was delayed for a year due to the pandemic.
Hours before the coffins arrived on Iraqi army vehicles, hundreds of residents of the town lined the road behind razor wire that was installed as a security barrier. Security forces knocked down male visitors, and Yazidi women checked female visitors’ suitcases and even their hair for explosives or other weapons.
On the steps of a concrete house outside the town, a group of women burned incense while temple musicians stood there playing antique songs.
One of the principles of religion is that when Yazidis die, they are reincarnated. But it did not reduce the pain for the survivors of the massacre.
While on the road with former neighbors, Elias Salih Qassim, a medical assistant, talked about what had become of his family of six brothers.
“I’m the only one who survived,” he said. Together with his brothers, ISIS killed his wife and three sons, the youngest of 14, one of his sisters and three nephews. Mr. Qassim was standing next to two of his brothers when they were shot.
He crawled out from under their bodies with bullet wounds to his legs. Traumatized, like thousands of other Yazidis, he spent the next four months recovering in the Kurdistan region, with only the concrete roof of a construction site for shelter.
Mr. Qassim says a morgue in Baghdad contains more than 200 other bodies that have also been removed from mass graves and is awaiting DNA testing.
“We want them to be handed over to us quickly, immediately, rather than reopening our wounds from time to time,” he said.
In the deserted village where the funeral was held, ISIS fighters sprayed ‘Islamic clinic’ on the health care facility that Mr. Qassim managed. On another brick wall, the faintest outline of a painted black-and-white ISIS flag remained. The school where villagers were summoned has been converted into a memorial with the names and photos of those killed. No one is likely to live in Kojo again.
The regional government in Kurdistan provided money until two years ago to help rescue Yazidi women and children who are still being held captive. But that money ran out as the world’s attention to their plight diminished.
Abdullah Shrim, a Yazidi beekeeper attributed to the rescue of nearly 400 Yazidis from ISIS by a network of smugglers in Syria, said money for such rescue efforts had dried up.
He says he is in contact with 11 women and children who are still being held by families connected to ISIS.
“If there was support, there could be so much more to do,” he said. “But because there is a lack of support, we can not work.”