Kurdistan Region president, Nadia Murad talk Yazidi remains retrieval, Shingal deal

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region — President Nechirvan Barzani received Yazidi activist and Nobel Peace Prize winner Nadia Murad in Erbil on Wednesday, with the retrieval of the remains of genocide victims from mass graves and the Shingal agreement between Erbil and Baghdad among the topics discussed, according to the Presidency office.

Barzani reaffirmed that the Kurdistan Region would continue its efforts to resolve difficulties affecting the Yazidi community and the district of Shingal, the ethnoreligious community’s heartland, “which needs the cooperation of the international community, the Iraqi government and relative parties,” read a Presidency statement.

Thousands of Yazidis were killed when the Islamic State(ISIS), which considers the ethnoreligious minority to be heretics, tore through Shingal and other parts of northern and western Iraq in 2014. The bodies of many of those killed still lie in mass graves.

More than six years later, mass graves containing the remains of Yazidi victims are still being found. The most recent exhumation took place in the Yazidi villages of Kocho and Solagh in October 2019.

Kocho, where Murad is from, is home to the largest number of Yazidi mass graves in the Shingal area. In Kocho alone, hundreds of men, adolescent boys, and older women were killed in August 2014, while more than 700 women and children were seized and taken to other ISIS-held areas. 

As part of the exhumation process, around 20 mass graves have been exhumed in the Shingal area, the remains of those found sent to Baghdad for DNA analysis and identification.

Related: Yazidi mass grave exhumations: To lift then lay to rest

Murad was received on Tuesday by Iraqi president Barham Salih discussed “the urgent need to overcome political and administrative obstacles that prevent justice for victims and families, as well as obstacles that prevent their return home", according to an Iraqi presidency statement.

Her meetings with the Iraqi and Kurdistan Region presidents come days after a bill in parliament that would offer reparations to survivors of the genocide failed to make the quorum needed to be voted on.

The Yazidi Female Survivors Bill, which has languished in parliament for nearly two years without a vote, guarantees job opportunities to survivors of the ISIS group by allocating them 2 percent of jobs in Iraq’s public sector, along with a fixed salary and land, according to previously released details.

Introduced to parliament in April 2019, the bill has had two readings, but a special parliamentary committee was formed to amend the draft legislation after pushback.

Baghdad reached a deal with the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) over the governance and security of Shingal, which is disputed between the two governments, on October 9.

According to the agreement, security in the area is Baghdad's responsibility. The federal government will have to establish a new armed force recruited from the local population and expel fighters from the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and their affiliated groups, according to agreement details released in October.

Implementation of the agreement began in November with the deployment of some 6,000 federal police to parts of Shingal that border Syria.

However, a commander of Shingal's Ezidkhan Protection Force, part of the Peshmerga,told Rudaw English last month that several different armed groups remain in the area.

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