KOJO, Iraq – They have waited years to bury the remains of their husbands, children and brothers. Packing fresh soil wrapped in Iraqi flags, the Yazidi women shouted as if their loved ones could still hear them.
On Saturday, the remains of 103 victims, members of the Yazidi ethnic minority, were returned to the village where, seven years earlier, ISIS arrested and shot them, throwing their bodies into mass graves. The massacre became synonymous with the group’s genocide campaign against the small religious minority.
Iraqi and international investigators exhumed the remains – including yet another body returned elsewhere in northern Iraq’s Sinjar district – two years ago and identified them by DNA testing.
The exhausting all-day ceremony to bury the 103 victims in Kojo was a stark reminder of the damage inflicted on Yazidis by ISIS, a tragedy that dates back to 2014 and has been compounded by years of government neglect.
ISIS killed up to 10,000 Yazidis and captured more than 6,000, most of them women and children, in what the United Nations and Congress called a genocidal campaign against the former group and other religious minorities in Iraq.
After the simple wooden coffins were buried in Kojo on Saturday, relatives threw themselves into the tombs, with women pulling their hair out, screaming in anguish and calling out to their loved ones in a crescendo of mixed sadness that could be heard far beyond the edge of the now abandoned village. Volunteers were waiting with stretchers to take the passed out to a mobile clinic.
The grief was compounded by collective pain at the loss of an entire community, where almost all of the older men and boys were killed. Saturday’s ceremony is to be repeated as the United Nations and other organizations search dozens of mass graves that have not yet been exhumed.
“Oh my little brother, my little heart!” shouted a woman. Another, doubled by sadness, remembered the new clothes her husband bought a few days before he was taken and murdered.
“My brother is a tall, handsome guy, this grave is too short for him,” sobbed another woman.
Other graves remained unsupervised, with entire families of victims killed or missing.
The massacre came three months after ISIS seized the city of Mosul, in northern Iraq, in 2014, and declared it the capital of its self-declared caliphate. ISIS fighters surrounded Kojo, an agricultural village just a few kilometers from Sinjar Mountain. Some of the fighters were from neighboring Arab Muslim villages, with whom the Yazidis had been friends for years.
On that suffocating day in August, the combatants ordered everyone in the village to meet at the local school – herding the women and children on the second floor and the men on the first. Many of the women and children heard the shots that killed their family members.
The fighters separated women they considered too old to be desirable and shot them in a nearby city, forcing the rest of the women and many of the girls into sexual slavery.
It took almost three years for Iraqi forces supported by the United States to expel ISIS from Iraq and another two years for forces led by the United States and Syrian Kurds to recover the last ISIS territory in Syria. More than 2,000 Yazidis are still missing.
Most of the Yazidis in Sinjar, the group’s traditional homeland, now live in camps for displaced people in the Iraqi Kurdistan region, hoping in abject poverty that their homes and villages will be rebuilt. A recent wave of suicides among young Yazidis shows the despair faced by a community destroyed by the ISIS massacre and subsequent government neglect.
Humanitarian agencies say the area where Yazidis live is still teeming with ISIS-era explosives, controlled by armed groups and divided by divisions among the Yazidis themselves.
The remains that were returned on Saturday included two brothers from Nobel Peace Prize winner Nadia Murad, who survived slavery by ISIS.
While relatives lined up to carry the long line of coffins to Kojo, Mrs. Murad took her place on the muddy road next to one of her brothers’ coffins. Another brother, Huzny, helped carry the coffin with one arm, enveloping Mrs. Murad with the other.
“We try to fool ourselves into thinking that it didn’t really happen in order to get on with life,” said Murad.
But this was a day to remember. Relatives of the victims, with their shoes stuck in the cold mud and their faces contorted in pain, carried the coffins on the long walk to the city and handed them over to an Iraqi honor guard.
“Today is a message to the whole world that the Iraqi government is not able to protect its minorities,” said Sheikh Naif Jasso, who was waiting to receive the coffins from his brother, the former village chief, and the rest of the victims being transported from a nearby military base.
Jasso said the same applies to the Kurdistan regional government, which was responsible for security in Sinjar until Iraqi government forces regained control in 2017.
Although the regional government has given refuge to Yazidis who have been displaced from their homes, most Yazidis feel betrayed by the Kurdish forces of pesh merga, saying they have asked residents to stay, promising to protect them from ISIS.
Instead, when faced with the imminent ISIS attack, Kurdish forces withdrew without warning, in what their commanders called “tactical withdrawal”, leaving the Yazidis to be slaughtered.
Murad and others fear that abandoning the Yazidi homeland is just ending what ISIS started.
“There are some clear signs that this community may disappear from its homeland and from Iraq,” she said.
“More than 100,000 Yazidis have emigrated since 2014,” she added. “There are entire communities, villages in Sinjar that are either destroyed or abandoned.”
Most Yazidis have been resettled in Germany, Canada and Australia. Although the United States helped with funding for Yazidis in Iraq – through aid for ISIS camps, construction projects and crime investigations, for example – the Trump administration accepted very few Yazidis.
Saturday’s burial ceremony was postponed for a year because of the pandemic.
Hours before the coffins arrived in Iraqi army vehicles, hundreds of villagers lined the road behind barbed wire placed as a security barrier. Security forces searched male visitors, and Yazidi women checked the bags and even the hair of visitors for explosives or other weapons.
On the steps of a concrete house outside the village, a group of women burned incense while musicians from the temple played ancient mourning songs.
One of the principles of religion is that when Yazidis die, they are reincarnated. But that did not lessen the pain for the survivors of the massacre.
Standing on the road with ex-neighbors, Elias Salih Qassim, a medical assistant, talked about what happened to his family of six brothers.
“I am the only one who survived,” he said. Along with his brothers, ISIS killed his wife and three children, the youngest of 14, one of his sisters and three nephews. Mr. Qassim was with two of his brothers when they were shot.
He crawled out of their bodies with gunshot wounds to the legs. Traumatized, like thousands of other Yazidis, he spent the next four months recovering in the Kurdistan region, with only the concrete roof of a construction site as a shelter.
Mr. Qassim says that a Baghdad morgue contains more than 200 other bodies also removed from mass graves and awaiting DNA tests.
“We want them to be delivered to us quickly, at once, instead of occasionally reopening our wounds,” he said.
In the abandoned village where the burial took place, ISIS fighters spray-painted an “Islamic clinic” at the health center run by Qassim. On another brick wall, the faintest outline of an ISIS flag painted in black and white remained. The school where the residents were arrested was turned into a memorial, with the names and photos of the dead. Nobody is likely to live in Kojo again.
The Kurdistan regional government had, until two years ago, provided funds to help rescue Yazidi women and children who were still in captivity. But that money ran out as global attention to your situation waned.
Abdullah Shrim, a Yazidi beekeeper responsible for rescuing almost 400 Yazidis from ISIS through a network of smugglers in Syria, said the money for these rescue efforts has run out.
He says he is in contact with 11 women and children still maintained by families affiliated with ISIS.
“If there was support, there would be much more to be done,” he said. “But, due to lack of support, we cannot work.”