Nov. 25 is the International Day Against Gender Violence. Phrases such as “Your Body, My Choice” emerging in relation to the last U.S. election are a reminder that gender-based violence can be uttered by men across cultures.
In the San Diego area, one of the largest concentrations of Iraqi diaspora are Yezidi women who escaped their sexual enslavement by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. While the threat of ISIS has been forgotten after the group’s defeat in 2018, we have forgotten the condition of those Yezidi women enslaved by the terror group.
From a human security perspective, the Yezidis, an ethno-religious minority in Iraqi and Syria, were particularly vulnerable to ISIS’s depredations, as their syncretic faith was labelled “devil worship” by the terrorists. In terms of their future, including those survivors in San Diego, this community has to overcome a collective trauma inflicted by ISIS.
ISIS’s enslavement of Yezidi women was part of a larger history of soldiers, militants and terrorists targeting women during conflict. Sexual violence during conflict serves two purposes. First, it is a means of building morale among fighters, creating a joint camaraderie of machismo in the form of collective sexual violence. Second, the sexual violence demoralizes the enemy, demonstrating they cannot protect “their women,” just one strategy in tandem with destroying the enemy’s home, culture, and heritage.
This motivation was not unique among ISIS but has been a tragic component of political violence in the past, and unfortunately into the future.
A decade ago, on Aug. 3, 2014, ISIS conquered the village of Kocho in the Sinjar area of northern Iraq. On Aug. 15, it began massacring several hundred men and elderly women of the Yezidi community, after they failed to convert to Islam. Nadia Murad, then 21 years old, witnessed the execution of her mother and brothers, and then was abducted along with other young Yazidi women as sex slaves.
Responsibility to Protect is an international norm for states to prevent genocide, mass atrocities, and war crimes, in response to the failure to do so in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. The U.S. airdropped food to trapped refugees on nearby Mount Sinjar but sat on the sidelines as the massacre ensued in this village.
More than ten years later, the international community still has a responsibility to remember the Yezidis who died, those dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder, including in the San Diego area, and to the more than 2,000 who are still missing. That responsibility includes the other victims of war who are only increasing in number in the 21st century — from the north of Iraq to Ukraine to Gaza. UNITAD, the United Nations Investigative Team to Promote Accountability for Crimes Committed by Da’esh/ISIL, was a dedicated remembrance body. Yet, its mandate was terminated.
Murad was able to escape and arrived in Germany in 2015. She was one of the fortunate also appointed as a UN goodwill ambassador, the first to represent “Dignity of Survivors of Human Trafficking.” Murad was eventually awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the first Iraqi to ever receive it.
In 2016 she met the Beirut-born British barrister Amal Alamuddin Clooney, who agreed to represent Murad. Both addressed the United Nations, advocating that the ISIS campaign be designated as a genocide. Their work was essential to the Security Council agreeing to establish UNITAD in 2017.
In the lobby of the United Nations General Assembly, a replica of Picasso’s Guernica mural hangs above the podium where international figures field questions from the media, a form of remembrance for the multilateral body, as the failure of the world community to act after Guernica eventually led to World War Two. By bearing witness to Guernica, UN diplomats would work to ensure it would not happen again. Yet, Guernica did happen again: Kocho was the Guernica of the 21st century.
UNITAD was an attempt to prevent future Guernicas. The Iraqi judicial system lacked the infrastructure to investigate and try all the members of ISIS responsible for these crimes. Hence, Baghdad requested the aid of the UN in the form of UNITAD, which has been collecting evidence since 2017.
Yet, the Iraqi government terminated this body’s mandate in 2024 due to conflicts with the UN team investigating the crimes. This denied justice to the survivors of ISIS atrocities. Closing such a body was not only a loss for the female survivors of gender-based violence, the Yezidis, as well as the Iraqi nation in general, it set a tragic global precedent. A dedicated UN body is imperative to document genocidal and gendercidal violence, and victims of war.
The genocidal rampage that ensued in Kocho in August 2014 continued for the women in captivity. To forge homogeneity within their “Islamic” state, ISIS sought the erasure of a pre-Islamic past by destroying antiquities and what it deemed as “pre-Islamic peoples,” expelling Christians from Mosul, many of whom fled to El Cajon, or enslaving Yezidi women to ensure that they could not give birth to future Yezidi children, a form of genocide specifically targeted against one gender, in what can be more specifically called a gendercide.
The work of lawyers or human rights investigators is like that of a historian, trying to collect material from the past from primary sources to construct a narrative in the present. Primary sources, in this case, include the videos and documents produced by ISIS itself documenting their genocide, as well as the testimonies of the victims.
Our responsibility to remember is a reminder, as well, to the damage done to the spiritual heritage of Yezidi temples and Christian churches by ISIS, in addition to forced expulsion. Both physical reconstruction and investment in mental healthcare infrastructure, which Iraq lacks, are still needed, as well as for local NGOs in San Diego dealing with the issue, such as License to Freedom.
As a historian, these deaths inspired me to advocate for remembering the victims of war in the San Diego area. The enslaved Yezidi women are one episode in this greater history of soldiers and civilians from the north of Iraq and Syria under ISIS, to Ukraine to Gaza, who have died or endured trauma and PTSD, internally displaced peoples and refugees, child soldiers, the victims of gender-based violence during conflict, the kidnapped and tortured, those maimed by landmines or IEDs and amputees, many reliant on prosthetics, landscapes poisoned by depleted uranium, to animals and domesticated pets caught up in conflicts that they had no role in creating.
Ibrahim Al-Marashi is an associate professor of history at Cal State San Marcos and a visiting scholar at University of San Diego and San Diego State University.
