Kurdistan
Hussein Qaidi, head of the Office for Rescuing Abducted Yazidis, speaking to Rudaw on August 3, 2024. Photo: Rudaw
ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - Over 1,000 Yazidis who survived the Islamic State (ISIS) atrocities have received treatment in Germany, said the head of office to rescue Yazidis on the tenth anniversary of a genocide against the ethno-religious group by ISIS.
“As per an agreement between the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) and the Baden-Wurttemberg region in Germany, 1,000 people had to be sent abroad for treatment in 2015. This was implemented and over 1,000 people were sent to Germany,”
Hussein Qaidi, head of the Office for Rescuing Abducted Yazidis, told Rudaw on Saturday that according to unofficial figures between 120-130 thousand Yazidis have left Iraq since the genocide.
The office is affiliated with the Kurdistan Region Presidency and was established in 2014 when ISIS swept through the Yazidi heartland of Shingal, committing genocide.
The International Organization for Migration (IOM) said in a report in 2021 that “Fears of persecution have caused large numbers of Yazidis to seek asylum outside of Iraq.”
“1,100 survivors, the majority of whom are Yazidi women and children, arrived in Germany via the Baden-Württemberg Special Quota Humanitarian Admission Programme, and other countries have since implemented similar initiatives,” it added.
Qaidi said 6,417 Yazidis were abducted by ISIS, and 3,579 of them have been rescued so far, adding that this number includes 1,210 women.
“We assure all Yazidi brothers and sisters that the work of the teams of the office to rescue the kidnapped Yazidis will continue until all are rescued. Thousands of the victims need long-term psychological treatment and special care which should be provided,” Kurdistan Region President Nechirvan Barzani said a speech delivered at an event in Erbil to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the Yazidi Genocide.
“Since the genocide, nearly 400 thousand people [from Shingal] have come to the Kurdistan Region, living in 21 camps. Nearly 250 thousand of them still remain in camps in scorching summer and freezing winter. How should their conditions be? Of course bad. Therefore, they should be returned to their homes as soon as possible,” Qaidi said, noting that between 25-30 percent of Yazidis have returned to Shingal so far, associating people’s unwillingness to return to their homes with the presence of several armed groups and lack of basic services.
Baghdad and Erbil signed an agreement in 2020 to normalize the situation in Shingal, but the deal has yet to be implemented.
Despite both the KRG and the Iraqi government calling on all armed groups to leave Shingal on several occasions, the agreement has been rejected by the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) whose proxies dominate parts of Shingal.
“The Iraqi federal government should cooperate with the Kurdistan Regional Government to implement the Shingal agreement and normalize the situation [in the town]. Serving the people of Shingal and the Yazidi community should be the priority of all of us. We should all work together so that Shingal and Yazidis will no longer become the victims of partisan and political agenda,” President Barzani said at the Erbil event.
Iraqi parliament passed the Yazidi Survivors Bill in 2021 which offers reparations to the survivors following languishing in the legislature for two years.
“Today's passage of Iraq’s Yazidi Survivors Bill is an important first step in acknowledging the gender-based trauma of sexual violence & need for tangible redress. Implementation of the law will need to be focused comprehensively supporting & sustainably reintegrating survivors,” Nadia Murad, one of the survivors of the genocide said in a post on X (then Twitter) at the time.
Murad is a prominent Yazidi activist and a Nobel Peace Prize laureate.
“Ten years on, our community — especially the survivors — remains resilient, tirelessly fighting for justice, rebuilding their lives, and restoring their community,” she said in a separate post on Saturday.
Qaidi slammed the Iraqi government for failing to implement the Yazidi Survivors Law.
“Unfortunately, the Iraqi federal government has taken only one step [to assist Yazidis] which was the passage of the Yazidi Survivors Law in 2021,” the head of the office said. “However, this law has 30 articles and 13 clauses but I think between 20-30 of them have not been implemented,” he lamented.
The Iraqi government has designated August 3 as a national day to remember the victims of massacres committed by ISIS in 2014 in Iraq. The KRG has welcomed the decision.
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