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The shadow of Islamic State looms large over Iraq and Syria. The legacy of years of bitter civil war, and the caliphate’s transnational conflict waged across the region, are carved into the landscape in the form of refugee camps and mass-graves. Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi’s soldiers have turned the Middle East into a graveyard. The atrocities of Islamic State have transformed the countries they’ve fought in, as have the war crimes and crimes against humanity of the government of President Bashar Assad. The dust has barely settled on these intertwined and vicious conflicts, yet the international community’s main focus has swiftly shifted from the military defeat of Islamic State to the increasing tensions between Iran and its main rivals; the United States, Israel and Saudi Arabia. The siege of Idlib - where thousands continue to be displaced, maimed and killed - and the uncovering of mass-graves across territories occupied by Islamic State are footnotes in the long war for Syria.
THE IRAQ WAR: PAVING THE ROAD TO GENOCIDE
Abu Musab Al Zarqawi: Former leader of Islamic State in Iraq.
In 2005, significant inter-communal violence had spilled over into open civil war across occupied Iraq. Several hundred miles to the south-east the capital of Iraq, Baghdad, has been ripped apart by Shi’a and Sunni death squads conducting pogroms against their respective religious sects as American soldiers supported by Iraqi Security Forces, continue their counterinsurgency operations against Islamic State of Iraq (ISI) and affiliated jihadist cells. In 2008, tensions had been running high in occupied Mosul during the August. Located in the Nineveh province, Iraq’s second-largest city has been hit by multiple suicide bombings throughout the year. In the late summer ISI linked attacks had increased to seven to ten per day in Mosul and the surrounding territories as ISI, pushed north by coalition operations had begun to conduct attacks in the rural areas in Za’ab to the south-east and the northern districts of Nineveh.
Earlier that year on April 22, 2007, a bus making its way from Mosul’s Textile Factory to the town of Bashika dropping off factory workers to their homes had been ordered to pull over by armed men at 3 pm. They boarded the bus checking cards for identification. Upon completion all passengers, with the exception of twenty-three of the textile workers, were dumped where they stood, their transport seized and the bus escorted to a different stopping point by the armed convoy of cars. The twenty-three suspect workers remaining on board were driven deep into the city as the convoy accompanying them pulled over in a street in northern Mosul. Within minutes, they were ordered off the bus, lined up against the wall and shot. The convoy of gunmen departed leaving the bodies of the men in the street riddled with bullets and the wall spattered with their blood.
According to the international media at the time, the murder had been an act of retribution after an incident in the town of Bashika which lay twenty-five kilometres north of Mosul. Situated in tranquil hills and surrounded by lush olive groves, the town was a popular destination for Mosul residents to retreat from the bustle of the city for family picnics and escape from a city gripped by revolutionary turmoil since the deposition of Saddam Hussein. Under the American occupation, Bashika had remained relatively stable despite the vicious civil war gripping the rest of the country where, despite General Petraeus’s objective to curb sectarian strife, ‘Yezidi temples, Muslim mosques and Christian churches stand in close proximity, presenting a rare image of tolerant coexistence.’ The town’s quiet nature in many ways epitomised the subtle richness and cultural diversity which came to define Nineveh’s province over centuries of history.
Weeks before the Mosul massacre, seventeen-year-old Du’a Khalil Aswad, a girl from Bashika had started a relationship with her neighbour, Muhannad, a young man from the Sunni community. Du’a was in her second year of study at the Fine Arts Institute in Bashika while Muhannad ran his own local cosmetic business further into town. Traditionally, marriage outside of the Yezidi faith is forbidden. Du’a suggested to Muhannad that they elope, but he refused, saying that Islamic tradition recommends that both families give their blessing to a marriage. Facing a dilemma, Du’a made the decision to convert to Islam so that she could marry Muhannad. She informed her parents, who while aware of the relationship were not pleased but did not take any action to stop her. They appear to have regarded her decision as a domestic matter, and not one for the wider community. When her tribe learned of her conversion, Du’a took refuge with a Yezidi sheikh who agreed to offer her sanctuary after her parents desperately pleaded with him to protect her from vengeance from the wider family including her uncles and cousins. Muhannad, fearing for his life, went into hiding. According to Mustafa Muslim, a local grocer, Du’a’s uncles came to the sheikh and told him that the family had forgiven Du’a and wanted her to return with them. “She thought they had really forgiven her, when she was going to her death,” said Muslim. “She was wearing a black skirt and a red jacket with her hair in a pony tail.” This forgiveness wrapped in lies proved fatal for Du’a. After exiting the house to be escorted home by her brother. She was ambushed by her cousins.
In the second account of the events which unfolded, local reports indicated that Du’a chose to run away with Muhannad and ‘they had been stopped at a checkpoint outside Mosul; others say she had been seen by her father and uncle just talking with the boy in public and, fearing her family's reaction, they had sought protection at the police station.’ At the police station, the couple awaited their fate as the Yezidi sheikh eventually arrived at the police station for Du’a and escorted her back to her hometown where she was placed in custody at the sheikh’s house. Hostage or not, the conflicting narratives eventually converged as the lynching which transpired came to exemplify ‘the extent to which the abuse of women had become both the vehicle and the justification for sectarian hatred in Iraq.’
Du’a, surrounded by thirteen cousins with a large crowd which was mainly composed of hundreds of men, was mobbed. They began violently kicking and punching her. Those nearest to Du’a tore at her hair and long black skirt and forced her to the ground shouting abuse. Bleeding heavily, she screamed for help from her brother and arriving father who was both unable to reach her through the barrier of people. Over the course of two hours, Iraqi security personnel stood by as the mob, whipped into a frenzied rage, conducted their execution. Mobile phones out, the horrifying spectacle was filmed by dozens of onlookers as Du’a lay on the ground covered in dirt. Unable to get up, young men stamped on her head and kicked every part of her they could reach and smashed her body against the concrete road. Her dress was ripped from her, exposing legs which were cruelly bruised as her body was tossed around like a rag-doll as stones began to rain down. Desperate, she attempted to cover her bloodied face, using one hand in an attempt to protect her dignity by covering her naked legs.
At first, she was pelted with smaller stones before larger bricks began dashing her face. One man threw a slab of concrete against Du’a’s head before retrieving it and throwing again. Her skull and spine fractured, Du’a struggling ceased and the teenager became still in the carnage as blood poured across the concrete. Face-down in a pool in blood, spectators and perpetrators took photos of Du’a’s body before carrying her body away. Journalist Mark Lattimer was told by one woman that following her stoning Du’a’s feet were hastily tied with rope and her body was dragged through the streets by a car after which her body was set alight. The charred corpse, which had once been a beautiful woman, was discarded into a pit on the outskirts of Bashika alongside a dead dog as a symbol of the shame she had brought to the tribe.
Videos of the stoning went viral and her Du’a’s murder spread across cyberspace like a virtual wildfire. A rumour spread that she had converted before she was killed. Thus she was adopted as a Muslim martyr by various vigilante and militia groups that then began to carry out reprisals against Yezidis. The shadow of the Iraq War began to smother Bashika. The town’s reputation was smeared by Islamic extremists and caught the attention of the international media as the killing of Du’a began to stoke a blood-feud, one which was being fed by the propaganda of the most brutal factions of the Iraq War. The twenty-three factory workers had been identified by their executioners as Yezidis and their bus had been intercepted by Sunni militants at a make-shift checkpoint as they returned to Bashika.
By this stage, tit-for-tat killings, executions and kidnappings had become a norm in post-Saddam Iraq. However, the latest round of violence underscored the sharpening divide between minority groups and Islamist Sunnis and Shiites. In particular, the determination by Petraeus to establish security in the streets of Baghdad and to reopen space for political coordination between Iraq’s three main sects; the Sunnis, the Shiites and the Kurds. This monolithic interpretation of the conflict obscured the urgent threats facing minorities across the country.
With intermittent violence occurring daily and a counterinsurgency campaign being waged, the stage was set for a devastating attack. ISI operatives were retreating and Sunni insurgents were occupying territories in the borderlands between Nineveh and the Syrian provinces of Deir ez-Zor and al-Hasakah north-west of Iraq. These locations, ‘strips of the most impoverished and sparsely populated parts of Iraq and Syria,’ were the easiest to escape U.S and Iraqi security forces. For the thousands of Assyrians, Kurds, Turkmens, Shabaks, Shiites, Sunnis, Christians, Yezidis, Armenians and Mandeans in the province, these territories were unprotected. For extremist cells, these groups presented an opportunity to foment sectarian violence and execute attacks against Nineveh’s soft underbelly. As Iraq’s most diverse province, dotted by perceived devil worshippers, heretics and infidels, the minorities were “soft targets” for ISI cells. The increasing tensions between Yezidis and hard-line Sunni Islamists had created an atmosphere which it could exploit despite the setbacks against the American occupation and Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad. ISI, similar to the Taliban in Afghanistan, calculated that they could outlast the occupation. Their anticipated withdrawal would leave minority groups vulnerable to militias and jihadists determined to take advantage of the security void left by the Americans.
Islamic State of Iraq’s deceased leader (killed in an American airstrike in 2006) Abu Musab Al Zarqawi was a genocidal psychopath and this was reflected in his organisation’s political and military activities across Iraq during the war. Minorities were no exception. In the Qahtaniyah districts, seventy-five miles west of Mosul, synchronised suicide bombings (a fuel tanker) ripped through the Yezidi communities of Qahtaniyah and Jazeera, roughly 100 kilometres from Mosul and south of Sinjar, close to the Syrian border. Sunni tribes had historical cross-border allegiances which, alongside the Syrian intelligence services funnelling of foreign fighters into Iraq, helped fuel insurgency and generated sympathy for Sunnis marginalised in post-Saddam Iraq by Shiite militias and paramilitary organisations. Two villages had been wiped off the face of the map by garbage trucks laced with explosives. It was the second-worst terrorist attack in modern history and the deadliest in Iraq, killing over 700 people and leaving over 600 people homeless.
Rescue workers had to search for bodies with their bare hands. Bodies covered by blankets could be seen laid in the street and outside a municipal building. Aid workers were digging through the rubble of the bomb-flattened clay-built homes in scenes reminiscent of an earthquake zone. Major Rodger Lemons, operations officer for a US brigade in the area, which is near the city of Mosul, said that rescue efforts are winding down. "My assessment is there's probably no one left alive in the rubble," he said. "We've transitioned through to a clean-up phase. I don't know if we'll ever get to a point where we'll have an exact figure," said Lemons.
“I saw a flash in the sky; I never saw anything like this before,” said Mr. Dalali, who lived in one of the villages. He said that after two huge explosions threw him to the ground where he was working his fields, he rushed to his house to check on his family. “The house was completely flattened to the ground,” Mr. Dalali said. “I was looking for any survivor from my family in the rubble. I found only my 12-year-old nephew.” His nephew’s ribs had been broken and he had suffered traumatic head wounds. The clay built homes stood little chance against the bombers. The suicide bombers were, according to an official at the Interior Ministry in Baghdad, linked to ISI. On 3rd September, a coalition airstrike killed the terrorist responsible for the planning and conducting of the horrific attack against the Yazidis in northern Iraq on 14th August, Abu Mohammad al-Afri.
Twenty four days after the attack on the village, General Petraeus went on to describe the situation in Iraq as progress from the year before. “To summarise, the security situation in Iraq is improving, and Iraqis elements are slowly taking on more of the responsibility for protecting their citizens.” The badly burnt and maimed survivors contradicted this statement and feared for the future. "Their aim is to annihilate us, to create trouble and kill all the Yazidis because we are not Muslims,” Salih, a Kurd told Reuters. “It's like a nuclear site, the site of a nuclear bomb.” “Al Qaeda wants to kill all the Yazidis," said another Kahtaniya villager, who gave his name only as Hossein. "Another bomb like this and there will be no more Yazidis left." In the shattered villages of Kahtaniya and Jazeera, the Yezidis communities did not speak of peace, they spoke of impending extermination by extremist cells including ISI. Zarqawi, the United States’ bogeyman had been dead for two years by this point, but his shadow remained imprinted on the organisation and his inner circle. One of these men was Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi who would eventually assume leadership of the terrorist group.
The bombings by Islamic State of Iraq - soon to be Islamic State - against the Yezidi communities in Qahtaniyah and Jazeera was the second deadliest act of terrorism in modern history behind the September 11 attacks in the United States. However, the acts of terror in Qahtaniyah and Jazeera joined a trail of devastating massacres across the Middle East. It did not gain traction across the Western world. The massacre blended with other attacks as just another suicide bombing in Iraq. IEDs and VBIEDs had long become a common phenomenon in a place were suicide bombings had not existed before the fall of Saddam Huseein. The genocidal ideology of Zarqawi and Islamic State had gone mainstream, and the identification process of Yezidis, the mass-execution of the textile workers and the coordinated bombings against the Yezidis in 2007 were a microcosm of the genocidal violence Islamic State of Iraq would unleash on the whole region during the Syrian and Iraqi civil wars. For Islamic State, the civil wars in Syria and Iraq were a transnational war to establish a caliphate.
THE CAMPAIGN
Following the capture of Mosul, Baghdadi and his fighters would cleanse Nineveh of its ethic and religious minorities conducting systematic rape, torture, abduction and harrowing violence. In August, 2014, in the shadow of Mount Sinjar, Islamic State soldiers rounded up and massacred Yezidi men and boys in Sinjar and its surrounding villages Kocho, Qiniyeh, Jadali and Jazeera. Yezidis who refused to pledge loyalty to Baghdadi and to convert to Islam were executed at roadsides, prison centres and along the roadsides where refugees fleeing for Mt. Singer were intercepted by Islamic State vehicles.
Yezidi women and children were abducted in their hundreds as personal prizes for jihadist fighters and subjected to rape or sexual abuse, forced to marry fighters, or sold into sexual slavery. Others were sold to traffickers whose trade had flourished since the collapse of the Iraqi state in 2003 and the inability of the government in Baghdad to control its porous borders following the departure of American soldiers in 2011. 830,000 people were displaced and fled Islamic State in the wake of the cleansing operations. The entire Yezidi population in Iraq had been uprooted and 40,000-50,000 had fled to Mt. Sinjar, historically a place of refuge for the community during the conflict.
The role of Islamic State in committing genocide against the Yezidis is the most notable example of opposition, the most extreme end of the spectrum, committing multiple crimes against humanity against the minority sect, Christians and Shia Muslims and other minority groups in the Syrian War. 200 mass-graves in Iraq, including the massacre at Camp Speicher, have been discovered. Near Raqqa, a mass grave believed to contain 1,700 bodies was found containing fighters of the caliphate and civilians. Nine graves at-least, filled with corpses of Islamic State members and civilians, have been found in Raqqa, victims of coalition airstrikes in November 2018. Over 1,800 soldiers were found in mass-graves at Camp Speicher, one of Islamic State’s worst massacres.
According to the UN Commission of Inquiry on Syria, as ISIS swept through Nineveh province in northeastern Iraq, the genocide against the Yezidis continued in Syria. ‘Thousands of women and girls, some as young as nine, have been sold in slave markets, or souk sabaya, in the Syrian governorates of Raqqah, Aleppo, Homs, Hasakah and Dayr Az- Zawr.’ Women and their children were sold, often multiple times, and distributed to different men and raped, beaten, tortured and sexually abused.
Many committed suicide to end their agony while young boys were converted and conscripted into Islamic State fighting squads in Syria. John Kerry, the former US Secretary of State directly accused the group, a strain of Al-Qa’ida in 2016 of conducting genocide in Syria and Iraq. He said that Islamic State was “genocidal by self-proclamation, by ideology and by actions, in what it says, in what believes and in what it does. In my judgement, ISIS is responsible for genocide against groups in areas under its control including Yazidis, Christians and Shia Muslims…in some cases also against Sunni Muslims, Kurds and other minorities.”
This followed a unanimous decision by the European Parliament to label ISIS atrocities as genocide. Lars Adaktusson hailed the vote as a historic moment. “It’s really important that the Parliament passed it, on a political level and a moral level. The significance is the obligations that follow by such recognition. The collective obligation to intervene, to stop these atrocities and to stop the persecution in the ongoing discussion about the fight against ISIS.” International action followed as a vast coalition was assembled to fight ISIS in both Syria and Iraq.
THE CALIPHATE NEVER DIED
The eventual collapse of the Islamic State’s project, once a territory the size of the United Kingdom, was a brutal, if a not inevitable war of attrition which has levelled cities and towns across the Middle East, displacing hundreds of thousands of civilians and killing tens of thousands more. Refugee camps have sprouted across Syria, Iraq and Turkey as result of the conflict between the international coalition and the lethal paramilitary-terrorist outfit which has launched attacks across the world and committed genocide and ethnic cleansing against minority communities in Syria and Iraq, and the Shia sect of Islam. In Al-Hol refugee camp, where the remnants of families of Baghdadi’s caliphate languish, children are bearing the brunt of Islamic State’s ideological war, and the crisis generated by the organisation’s military defeats. The conditions of the camps where the families of Islamic State are interned are wretched. 7,000 children of foreign nationals are housed in the Annex where ‘the numbers of children under 5 dying has more than doubled since March 2019.’ These children have died from preventable diseases and illness, including dehydration, pneumonia and malnutrition and the doubling of the death toll correlates closely with the surge of the camp population size from 9,000 to 70,000 when Islamic State’s final village, Baghouz, was recaptured in March.
Arwa Damon, reporting for CNN from the camp, described Al-Hol as an “open-air prison” where Islamic State extremists and sympathisers are forming cells, intimidating those who refuse to submit to sharia law in the camp. Several women, including Shamima Begum - who grew up in Bethnal Green, London - have wanted to return home, but have been blocked by European governments who have been hesitant to allow the ‘jihadi brides’ to return. In limbo, and abandoned by the international community, the genocidal ideology of Islamic State has been allowed to fester and the neglect has helped extremists use these conditions of the “open-air prison” as a tool for recruitment and radicalisation within the camp and beyond its borders. Guards have been targeted in knife attacks, and women are being killed by Islamic State extremists within the camps. Several victims were beaten to death, strangled or tortured by their murderers.
Islamic State’s defeats in Syria and Iraq have done little to dissuade the organisation’s international cells from carrying out attacks. In the Philippines, Islamic State launched two major attacks which killed a combined 26 people in January and June on Jolo Island which included a suicide bombing in a cathedral. Afghanistan’s communities, currently in a maelstrom of bloodshed and violence, have been targeted by various insurgent and terrorist organisations among them Islamic State. 63 people were murdered in a suicide bombing at a wedding on August 17th. Over 180 more were injured and traumatised by the bombing in Kabul. “My family, my bride are in shock, they cannot even speak. My bride keeps fainting,” said Mirwais, the groom. “I lost my brother, I lost my friends, I lost my relatives. I will never see happiness in my life again.” A few weeks after Baghouz was captured by Kurdish forces, Islamic State launched one of its most devastating terrorist attacks in Sri Lanka. 259 men, women and children were killed and 500 more were wounded on Easter Sunday as seven suicide bombers targeted churches and hotels across the egg-shaped paradise island.
Dozens of attacks by Islamic State suspects and militants have been disrupted and thwarted by security services, not only in Iraq, Gaza, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan, but also the United Kingdom, Albania, Morocco, Spain, Ethiopia, Germany, Malaysia, Israel, Australia, United States, and Nicaragua. In Nigeria, the Lake Chad region and the Sahel region, Boko Haram and Islamic State’s West Africa Province has waged a decade long insurgency across four countries. Islamic State has lost its territories in the Middle East, but the paramilitary-terrorist organisation has lost none of its potency, nor has it lost the ability to wage indiscriminate asymmetrical, urban warfare, a trademark under both Baghdadi and Zarqawi. In a special report by the CNN, Kurdish forces described Al-Hol camp as a ‘ticking time bomb’ where children risk being radicalised, as do the families who exist in limbo, unwanted by the countries they left to join Islamic State and unwanted by the communities they helped destroy in the Middle East. The militant Salafist ideology of Islamic State remains a global phenomenon, and its defeat in Raqqa and Mosul has led to the organisation’s mutation. “There is no lack of Islamic militant groups here,” said an Israeli officer in the occupied Jaulan Heights to Politico Magazine. “You just haven’t heard of them yet.”
Without addressing the atrocities buried by Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, and bringing those who have committed war crimes and crimes against humanity to account through counter-terrorism operations and where possible in the court of law, grievances will remain unaddressed. The alternative ideas, peddled by hard-right policymakers, media and governments, that leaving men, women and children in limbo and stateless in camps such as Al-Hol is the answer to the genocidal ideology and activities of Islamic State is fantastical. It is a short-term solution which courts a long-term threat to the international community.