Otten - With ash on their faces : yezidi women and the Islamic State

2017 Cathy Otten

Published for the book trade by OR Books in partnership with Counterpoint Press.

Distributed to the trade by Publishers Group West.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher, except brief passages for review purposes.

First printing 2017

Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress.

A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-1-944869-45-8

Text design by Under|Over. Typeset by AarkMany Media, Chennai, India.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For my Mum and Dad

You are under our protection

We fought for six hours and nobody came

They were killing our men in the valley

There was almost no life but you could see people moving

He told me about marriage, he told me about love

We asked him to destroy her

I would burn him alive

All those ISIS motherfuckers are no good

Bucca was their school

No one can bring back the dead

I was a hunter on Sinjar Mountain

If it wasnt for her, I couldnt have done it

I see them in my dreams and they are selling me

I belong to ISIS and my family are infidels

If there were water we should stop and drink

Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think

Sweat is dry and feet are in the sand

If there were only water amongst the rock

Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit

Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit

There is not even silence in the mountains

But dry sterile thunder without rain

T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land

God witnessed this tragedy,

the stunned moon witnessed it,

the lithe xerophytes witnessed it,

the salty warm dark soil witnessed it,

the hot golden noon witnessed it,

the burned houses, the dead bodies,

the dusty air, the bloods smell,

and the sunbeams witnessed it.

But, none dared to prevent it.

I did not: coward, feeble, poor sister.

Nawaf Ashur, Five Sisters

KRG (Kurdistan Regional Government) has governed the semi-autonomous Kurdistan Region in northern Iraq since the no-fly zone was put in place after Saddam Husseins brutal repression of the 1991 Kurdish uprising. The Kurdistan Regional President Masoud Barzani has ruled for over ten years and his term has been extended twice. His nephew Nechirvan Barzani is the Prime Minister of the Kurdistan Region, and his son Masrour Barzani is the Chancellor of the Kurdistan Regions Security Council.

KDP (Kurdistan Democratic Party), founded in 1946, is one of the two main parties in the KRG, and is led by acting KRG President Masoud Barzani. The KDPs power base is in Erbil and Dohuk governorates in the west of the Kurdistan Region. Dohuk shares a border with Turkey and the KDP has good relations with Turkeys ruling party.

PUK (Patriotic Union of Kurdistan), founded in 1975 after splitting from the KDP, is the other main political party in the KRG, with a strong support base in Sulaimaniyah and Kirkuk provinces, and eastern areas of the Kurdistan Region. The PUK, unlike the KDP, has traditionally had closer ties with the PKK, Iran and the Iraqi federal government. The KDP and PUK fought a civil war between 1994 and 1998.

PKK (Kurdistan Workers Party) was established in 1978 and is led by Abdullah calan. The PKK has fought the Turkish state in a war for Kurdish rights and more autonomy which has lasted over three decades and resulted in more than thirty thousand dead on both sides. The PKK, classified as a terrorist organization by the EU, US, and Turkey, has bases in the mountains where Turkey, Iran, and Iraq meet.

YPG (Peoples Protection Units) is the armed force that protects the autonomous cantons known as Rojava in northern Syria that emerged out of the tumult of that countrys civil war. The YPG is an affiliate of the PKK, but unlike the PKK it is not listed as a terrorist organisation and benefits from security co-operation with the US in the war against ISIS.

YBS (Shingal Resistance Units) is a local Yezidi force that falls under the PKK umbrella and also includes many YPG and PKK fighters in its ranks.

HPE (zidxan Protection Force) is an independent Yezidi force in Sinjar led by Hayder Shesho. The force briefly received salaries from the Iraqi government. In 2015 Shesho was detained and then released by the KDP on charges of commanding an unsanctioned militia. His force is now reportedly under the Ministry of Peshmerga.

ISIS is the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, previously known as the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI). ISI grew from the ashes of Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) after the death of its leader, Abu Musab al Zarqawi, in a US drone strike north of Baghdad in 2006. In 2013, ISI split with the Al-Qaeda franchise when it announced that it would rule the Syrian Al Qaeda branch and become ISIS. In June 2014 the group changed the name to Islamic State. It is also commonly known as ISIL, Daesh, IS (Islamic State), or ISIS.

Peshmerga is the army of the Kurdistan region, which grew out of long-standing guerrilla fighters of the KDP and PUK. They are split into three main groups: the KDP-aligned 80 force, the PUK-aligned 70 force, and 14 Regional Guard Brigades administered by the KRGs Ministry of Peshmerga. Recently the Peshmerga have also absorbed smaller Yezidi militias. Reform plans call for Peshmerga professionalization under unified non-partisan command. In Kurdish, Peshmerga means those who face death.

Introduction

It was a bright, early autumn morning outside the psychiatric
ward of a hospital in Iraqi Kurdistan. Sunlight doused the
corridors. Outside the windows, the mountains that divide Iraq, Turkey, and Syria were still topped with snow. Inside, lining the hallways, were people who had made it this far to ask for help.

The psychiatrist, Dr. Haitham Abdulrazak, couldnt offer them much in the way of medicine (the hospitals stocks were low). Instead, he talked with his patients, attempting to find out more about the events that lay behind their symptoms. He allowed me to watch and report. I observed Yezidi survivors delivering anxious, staccato reports about their experiences of escape and murder.

Dr. Haitham, a tall, stooping man with a bright yellow shirt under his doctors jacket, spoke to them softly. After the worst years of the civil war in Iraq, he had left his position at a clinic in Baghdad to come to this hospital in the town of Zakho, near the Turkish border in northern Iraq. The violence had followed him.

In the summer of 2014, about a third of Iraq fell to ISIS. Zakho, along with other towns and cities in the relatively safe Kurdistan region, were flooded with hundreds of thousands of desperate people. They were survivors of sudden massacres that had left thousands of corpses strewn across the plains of Sinjar.