After the Islamic State group's Sinjar attack, local groups step up to the plate

With help from two Yazidi-run nonprofits, Free Yezidi Foundation and Yazda, Luis Moreno-Ocampo was able to reach Lalish — a mountain village in Kurdistan in northern Iraq that Yazidis deem a holy site — last week. The former International Criminal Court chief prosecutor was there to discuss what he said could be a strong case for Yazidi genocide to be brought to trial at the ICC. FYF and Yazda — which organized Moreno-Ocampo’s trip — are just some of the organizations delivering much-needed assistance to the Yazidis, a largely ethnically Kurdish group that has been the target of the Islamic State group since last year. But religious violence against the Yazidis is not a recent occurrence. Incorporating aspects of Zoroastrianism, Christianity and Islam into their beliefs, the Yazidis have had a long history of being subjected to persecution. Their belief in Melek Taus, a fallen angel whom Yazidis consider to have redeemed himself, led to a centuries-old accusation of devil worship and compelled the group to seek refuge in Iraq’s remote mountain regions, Thomas Schmidinger, who specializes in Kurdish politics at the University of Vienna, told the National Geographic. Massacres by the Ottoman Empire, Arabization campaigns of Iraq’s deposed President Saddam Hussein, and targeting by some Sunni Muslim groups after the fall of the Saddam regime were just some instances of oppression that the Yazidis endured over the years. The threat under the Islamic State group, however, seems to have been far more dangerous and directed than previous persecutions. Thousands of Yazidis, mostly men, were killed in last year’s attack on Sinjar, Iraq. A New York Times investigation meanwhile revealed that the brutal Islamist militant group subjected abducted Yazidis, mostly women and children, to an organized system of rape used both as a war tactic and recruiting tool. Small groups, big responsibilities Pari Ibrahim, founder and executive director of FYF, herself left Kurdistan with her family when she was just 3 years old to evade the attacks of the Saddam regime. Soon after Sinjar fell to the Islamic State group, she established FYF, which is officially registered in both the Netherlands and Kurdistan. “I did not begin this organization as an expert in development in conflict areas,” Ibrahim told Devex. “Thankfully, I was able to get many experts as board members to help us out along the way.” FYF board members include Rolf Carriere, a pro-bono senior adviser to the Nonviolent Peaceforce; Victoria McColm, who served as director for northern Iraq and western Afghanistan on a special task force in the Office of the Secretary at the U.S. Department of Defense; and David Sklar, who has spent six years as an adviser to the Kurdistan Regional Government. Yazidis who have managed to leave the Islamic State group’s strongholds are currently living in camps, abandoned buildings and even under bridges. Through a $120,000 grant from Gucci’s Chime for Change movement, a $30,000 donation from a Kurdistan-based group and contributions from several individual donors, FYF is building centers that are meant to be safe spaces for Yazidi women and children who are staying in these often cramped and inhospitable temporary shelters. The group also plans to work with international post-trauma experts and local practitioners to increase the local capacity for crucial psychosocial support. Later this year, funding from the German government will enable 25 field psychologists to take the first post-trauma course from FYF and another local organization. “We do seek funding to ensure that operations for 2016 will be fully funded — so that we can hire and pay the salaries of teachers, purchase goods for the women and children each month, and complete the post-trauma training centers,” Ibrahim said. Like FYF, United States-based Yazda emerged after the Sinjar siege. Abid Shamden, board member and medical program manager at Yazda, told Devex that while finding the resources to finance operations was tough at the beginning, “we couldn’t just sit back and watch our people suffer.” “Most of Yazda board members worked with the U.S. Army in Iraq between the years of 2003 and 2011, so to some extent we do have some experience working in conflict areas, but nothing the size of the recent Yazidi tragedy,” Shamden said. Yazda has provided emergency support in the form of food, clothes, medical assistance and cash to more than 350 Yazidi women and girls. But since the group doesn’t have its own funding, it relies on online donations, which Shamden said only meet around 20 percent of emergency needs. After a process that according to Shamden entailed months of paperwork, Yazda was also able to help more than 200 Yazidi survivors receive a monthly salary of 110,000 Iraqi dinars ($100) from the Iraqi federal government’s Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs. “We are still waiting for the Iraqi government to approve the same thing for the rest of the women,” Shamden said. While Yazda has a clinic where Yazidis who can’t afford to seek treatment from doctors or buy medicines can get the help they need, it also uses donations to assist Yazidi women in acquiring the necessary documents to travel abroad and access treatment for injuries that require urgent medical attention. According to Shamden, the group is aiming to help 300 Yazidi women get their papers so they can go to Germany, which will offer medical treatment for 600 women until the end of the year. “I am working to establish a referral system to help the escaped women get medical treatment outside of Iraq,” Shamden said. “I am hoping that this program will take place even though it is still at the early stages.” Rehabilitation and reintegration The majority of Yazidi women and girls are still in the hands of the Islamic State group. Yazidi children, meanwhile, are being forced to surrender their faith and adopt the kind of radical Islam that conforms to the group’s beliefs. Still, the weakened impact of the Islamic State group on northern Iraq has significantly improved the security situation, and aid groups’ ability to assist Yazidis has risen dramatically, Ibrahim said. For example, the relatively safer environment has made it possible for Wadi, an Iraqi-German nongovernmental organization that runs its activities from Dohuk in Kurdistan, to try an inventive and effective approach: It deploys mobile teams composed of one male driver, one Yazidi woman and one Kurdish woman to reach out to Yazidi escapees. According to a report from Al-Jazeera, the inclusion of a female Yazidi member in such teams earns the trust of Yazidi women and girls, who feel more comfortable about describing their painful experiences to Wadi staff than their own families. Even those who have to undergo hymen reconstruction surgery only tell women from Wadi about their ordeal. Organizations also occasionally work in tandem to better respond to both short- and long-term needs. For example, Yazda and Samaritan’s Purse, a nondenominational evangelical Christian group that earlier this year provided clean and functioning toilets to displaced Yazidis, are in the process of opening a post-trauma center in Dohuk. Yazda is also working with Voices of Rwanda, a group that records and preserves Rwandan testimonies about genocide to prevent more grave human rights violations, in creating the largest archive to document the atrocities committed against the Yazidis. “There’s some sort of coordination among groups, but since there are too many small groups, it’s hard to coordinate with all of them,” Shamden said. But perhaps the more daunting challenge is getting the ICC to recognize the continued crimes against the Yazidis as an act of genocide. While Moreno-Ocampo expressed hopes that a preliminary examination could be opened before November, the odds seem stacked against the Yazidis: Iraq, after all, is not a signatory to the ICC. A case based on the ICC’s right to look into crimes perpetrated by the nationals of its member states has legal grounds, but remains unprecedented, according to a report from Reuters. There’s also the issue of reestablishing Yazidis in their communities — a huge task further complicated by the simple, sad reality that survivors are unable to return to their homeland. Still, there’s a glimmer of hope: Victims of conflict-related sexual violence around the world are often ostracized upon their return, but in the case of the Yazidis, this isn’t happening. According to an interview with Human Rights Watch researchers Samer Muscati and Rothna Begum, who talked to Yazidi women and girls who fled the Islamic State group’s self-styled caliphate, Baba Sheikh, a prominent Yazidi spiritual leader, is partly responsible for quelling the stigma usually and unfairly associated with sexual violence. Instead of shunning those who were raped or forced to convert to Islam, or at least the twisted form of Islam that the Islamic State group espouses, Yazidis are encouraged to welcome back these survivors without judgment. It is an important shift that could also be attributed to Yazidi activists and Yazda itself. “We coordinated with Baba Sheikh … to announce to all Yazidis that they must help reintegrate the rescued Yazidis,” Shamden said. Nongovernmental organizations and the media, no matter how noble the intentions, should take careful measures to impart to the Yazidis the same dignity. Muscati pointed out that some NGOs and journalists with little to no experience in interviewing trauma victims risk compromising the identities of Yazidi survivors and, consequently, the safety of Yazidi family members who are still in territories controlled by the Islamic State group by recording their accounts on video, for example. “We also hope that all members of the media will be fully respectful of the suffering of the survivors, especially the women and girls coming back from captivity, rather than rushing for a story without regard for the well-being of the victims,” Ibrahim said. Conflict in Context is a monthlong global conversation on conflict, transition and recovery hosted by Devex in partnership with Chemonics, Cordaid, Mercy Corps , OSCE and USAID. We’ll decode the challenges and highlight the opportunities countries face while in crisis and what the development community is doing to respond. Visit the campaign site and join the conversation using #ConflictinContext.