Introduction
In October 2024, Fawzia Amin Sido, a 21-year-old Yazidi woman, was released from the Gaza Strip through a joint rescue effort involving Iraq, Israel, the United States, and Jordan (Al Jazeera, 2024). In August 2014, at 11 years of age, she had been abducted from her village in Sinjar, northern Iraq. Across a decade, she was trafficked first to Syria, then taken to the Gaza Strip, where she was held captive by the family of a Palestinian Islamic State (ISIS) fighter (Al Jazeera, 2024). After her rescue, she was taken through Israel and Jordan, and then reunited with her family in Sinjar (Al Jazeera, 2024). However, within three weeks, Iraqi militias reportedly threatened her and her relatives after she publicly acknowledged Israel’s role in her rescue (Hussein, 2025). In February 2025, she was moved to Germany, where human rights activists and her lawyer welcomed her at Hannover Airport (Hussein, 2025). Now, she rebuilds her life there, far from the home she may never be able to return to.
Fawzia’s experience is not unusual; it reflects a broader pattern affecting thousands. It points to a continuing crisis that remains underfunded, insufficiently prosecuted, and increasingly sidelined internationally. The genocide against the Yazidis, which dates back to August 3rd, 2014, remains far from resolved. Between 2,800 and 3,000 Yazidis are recorded as missing, majority of whom are women and children (Yildirim et al., 2025). Approximately 190,000 Yazidis remain displaced, mostly across 15 internally displaced people (IDP) camps across the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (Free Yezidi Foundation, n.d.). At the same time almost every international mechanism created to support and protect the community, which include the United Nations (UN) Investigative Team to Promote Accountability for Crimes Committed by Da’esh/ISIL (UNITAD), the UN mission in Iraq (UNAMI), and the displaced persons camps have either been closed, or are in the process of being dismantled (UNITAD, 2024; UN News, 2025; Human Rights Watch, 2024).
This article analyses the current situation of the Yazidis across four main areas: (i) accountability for genocide, (ii) the ongoing displacement, (iii) the restrictive legal framework for survivors and the unresolved question of the missing, and (iv) the withdrawal of international assistance. Through this article, the authorial intent is to draw attention to the Yazidis, arguing that past a decade of the genocide, the world neglects the Yazidis once again.
Who Are the Yazidis?
The point of whether Yazidis constitute a distinct ethnoreligious group or a subgroup of the Kurdish population is hugely contested amongst scholars and the broader community. Many Yazidis identify as a separate people with their own language, Ezidiki, while others identify them as Kurdish (Arakelova, 2010). In countries such as Iraq and Armenia, they are officially recognised as a distinct ethnic group. Their main population is concentrated in Sinjar and nearby parts of Nineveh Governorate. Yazidis follow one of the world’s oldest monotheistic traditions, combining elements from ancient Iranian beliefs, Zoroastrianism, and Sufi practices, centred on the figure of the Peacock Angel, Tawusi Melek (Spät, 2005). Misinterpretations of these beliefs have long led to accusations of being “devil worshippers”, a label that extremist groups, including the Islamic State (ISIS), have used to justify violence against them.
Prior to August 2014, approximately 400,000 to 500,000 Yazidis lived in and around Sinjar (Nadia’s Initiative. (n.d.)). On August 3rd, 2014, ISIS launched a coordinated attack where more than 5,000 men and older women were executed and buried in mass graves, while over 6,400 women and children were abducted, and subjected to sexual slavery, forced religious conversion, and sold through ISIS slave markets (Nadia’s Initiative, n.d). Approximately 400,000 people fled towards Mount Sinjar, where many remained stranded for days without food or water. International bodies such as the UN, the European Union, the Council of Europe, and countries including Armenia, Australia, Canada, the Council of Europe, the European Union, France, Germany, Ireland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, the United Nations and the United States have formally acknowledged that these events constitute as genocide (IBAHRI, 2024).
The Accountability Collapse
Over ten years later, the pursuit of legal accountability for crimes committed against the Yazidis has taken place in a handful of countries, including Kosovo, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, Belgium, and most recently France (The Associated Press, 2021; Yazda, 2024a, Opinio Juris, 2025; France 24, 2025; France 24, 2026). While these proceedings are significant in nature, they must be viewed in light of the estimated 30,000 to 40,000 ISIS members from at least 85 countries involved in perpetuating the violence (Moffett, 2024). The contrast between the scale of the crimes and the number of prosecutions remains stark.
Germany has played a leading role, securing nine convictions, including three for genocide. The 2021 case of Taha al-Jumailly marked the first conviction worldwide recognising ISIS crimes against Yazidis as genocide. He received a life sentence for enslaving a Yazidi woman and her young daughter, who succumbed to death after being left chained outside in extreme heat (Doughty Street Chambers, 2024). Similarly, other European countries have also followed suit.
In December 2024, a court in The Hague convicted Dutch national Hasna A. of enslaving a Yazidi woman for crimes against humanity, sentencing her to ten years, the first conviction of its kind in The Netherlands (JusticeInfo, 2026). In February 2025, Sweden convicted Lina Ishaq for genocidal acts, sentencing her to 12 years; the conviction was then upheld on appeal in November 2025 (SyriacPress, 2025). Belgium and Kosovo also initiated proceedings against an individual for crimes committed against Yazidis (JusticeInfo, 2026). In March 2026, France concluded its first genocide trial, in absentia, convicting Sabri Essid to life imprisonment for crimes against Yazidi women and children between 2014 and 2016, with at least 18 further French nationals under investigation (Free Yezidi Foundation, 2026; France 24, 2026).
These judgments represent important legal progress, showing that domestic courts can trigger universal jurisdiction to address international crimes. However, they share a key limitation: they overwhelmingly target low-level perpetrators, individuals who enslaved Yazidi women in their homes, with several tried in absentia. The senior planners, commanders, and high-level orchestrators of the genocide, and those who planned and directed the systematic kidnapping, enslavement, and mass killing of Yazidis, have not faced any judicial proceedings.
A major structural gap is the absence of an international court with jurisdiction over ISIS crimes. Iraq is not a party to the Rome Statute, which means the International Criminal Court (ICC) cannot initiate an investigation without a UN Security Council referral. Russia and China have blocked such referrals. Despite repeated calls from Nobel Peace Prize laureate Nadia Murad and international human rights lawyers, including Amal Clooney, no ad hoc international tribunal comparable to those created for Rwanda or the former Yugoslavia has been established (Moffett, 2024). Iraq’s Criminal Code also does not legally recognise genocide, crimes against humanity, or war crimes as separate offences. Over 20,000 ISIS members have been tried in Iraqi courts only under national laws relating to counter-terrorismthat prescribe the death penalty. This has resulted in a legal fallacy, as UNITAD was prohibited by virtue of UN policy, from sharing its evidence with Iraqi courts because doing so could contribute to capital punishment (Security Council Report, 2024).
UNITAD was created in 2017 to collect and preserve evidence of ISIS crimes for future prosecutions. On September 17th, 2024, its mandate ended after Iraq requested its closure under UN Security Council Resolution 2697 (2023). In seven years of operation, UNITAD dug up 67 mass graves, digitised 18 million pages of ISIS records, identified 1,444 potential perpetrators, and produced 19 case assessments (UNITAD, 2024). That evidence was kept at UN headquarters in New York. Iraq established a successor body, the National Centre for International Judicial Cooperation (NCIJC), to continue the work, but as of February 2025, the NCIJC has only held its first meeting with civil society organisations, and its capacity, independence, and resources remain uncertain (Yazda, 2025).
The amendment to the existing Iraqi General Amnesty Law No. 27 of 2016, passed on January 21st, 2025, as part of a three-bill legislative package, introduced further threat to accountability. It allows detainees to seek retrials where confessions were allegedly obtained under torture or based on secret informant testimony. By December 2025, the Supreme Judicial Council confirmed that over 40,000 individuals had been released under the law (Rudaw, 2026). The Yazidi community condemned it from the outset, fearing that ISIS perpetrators convicted of terrorism offences, rather than specific crimes against Yazidis, could benefit from retrials and walk scot-free (Nadia’s Initiative, 2025). Iraq’s government confirmed that Article 9 of the Yazidi Survivors Law technically excludes those convicted of kidnapping or enslaving Yazidis, but civil society organisations remain sceptical about enforcement in practice (Kurdistan24, 2025).
Sinjar’s Frozen Devastation
Approximately 150,000 Yazidis have returned to Sinjar, roughly 30 to 37 percent of the pre-2014 population (Sayki, 2024), but for most of those still in camps, there is no realistic prospect of return in the near future. Approximately 120,000 Yazidis have emigrated entirely, with Germany now home to around 200,000 Yazidis (Sayki, 2024).
The destruction of infrastructure in Sinjar alone makes return nearly impossible for most families. According to the International Organization of Migration, 80 percent of public infrastructure and 70 percent of homes in Sinjar were destroyed during and after the ISIS occupation (IOM, 2024). Over 200 mass graves have been discovered, but the majority remain unburied. Unexploded bombs cover wide stretches of land. Electricity and water are not consistently available, and many schools and health facilities remain damaged or understaffed (HRW, 2023a). Roads remain in disrepair throughout the district.
The political constraints to return are just as serious as the physical ones. The 2020 Sinjar Agreement, signed between the Iraqi federal government and the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) to resolve governance and security arrangements, has not been implemented. The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) confirmed in its 2025 annual report that the failure to fully implement the agreement allowed competing militias to intimidate residents and pressure young Yazidi men to join their group (USCIRF, 2025a). The main reason is that the agreement excluded the two most powerful armed groups on the ground, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK)-affiliated Sinjar Resistance Units (YBS) and the Iran-backed Popular Mobilisation Forces (PMF). As long as these groups remain in the area, no functioning administration can be established (Saleem and Mansour, 2024). There is one small but important development: in July 2024, the Nineveh Provincial Council selected a Yazidi mayor for Sinjar, formally fulfilling one provision of the agreement, though the broader implementation remains halted (USCIRF, 2025a).
In May 2025, the PKK announced its dissolution following imprisoned leader Abdullah Öcalan’s call to disarm, a development seen by many as potentially transformative for Sinjar (Ibrahim and Ismael, 2025). Whether the PKK-affiliated YBS will genuinely and fully withdraw remains deeply uncertain, and Iran-backed PMF forces show no indication of leaving the area. Turkish airstrikes against suspected PKK targets have also continued to prevent returns to certain areas. Sinjar has been described by Chatham House researchers as a transnational conflict hub, connecting overlapping tensions from Iraq, Turkey, Syria, and Lebanon (Saleem and Mansour, 2024).
The financial barriers are equally severe. Iraq’s parliament allocated only USD 38 million for Sinjar and the Nineveh Plains in its three-year budget. Civil society organisations have called this budget inadequate, urging for a dedicated USD 1.5 billion reconstruction fund (Free Yezidi Foundation, 2023). Return compensation packages offer 4 million Iraqi dinars, approximately USD 3,000 per family (Human Rights Watch, 2023a), but for years, payments were withheld entirely. It was only in November 2024 that Iraq began distributing a first round of compensation, approving approximately USD 75.5 million for 11,000 people from Sinjar and the wider Nineveh Governorate, though around 11,500 approved claims from Sinjar alone were still waiting for payment at that time (Human Rights Watch, 2024). In March 2025, Iraqi Prime Minister Sudani launched 14 infrastructure projects worth approximately USD 13.7 million in Sinjar and the Nineveh Plains (Lee, 2025). These are welcomed steps, but they remain far short of what is needed to rebuild a district that was systematically destroyed.
Meanwhile, displaced Yazidis in camps are being urged to leave with no safe place to go. The Iraqi government announced all IDP camps would close by July 2024, however, the deadline was missed and repeatedly extended. In August 2025, Iraq attempted to reclassify camp-resident families as integrated and stable within society, a bureaucratic step understood as preparation for forced camp closure (SyriacPress, 2025). The KRG rejected this as unprecedented and unconstitutional. Humanitarian aid to the remaining camps has decreased by approximately 70 percent according to Duhok’s migration director (HRW, 2024). Families are trapped between worsening camp conditions and their hometown that is not yet safe nor liveable.
Missing Persons and Ongoing Legal Barriers
Of the thousands abducted by ISIS, many remain missing (Yildirim et al, 2025). Efforts to locate them have slowed, and there is no comprehensive international strategy dedicated to this issue. While some initiatives, such as DNA identification projects, are ongoing, progress remains slow.
The fall of the Assad regime in Syria in December 2024 raised hopes that the new government might help find Yazidis, particularly in the Al-Hol camp in northeastern Syria, where over 44,000 women and children are detained and where hundreds of Yazidis are believed to be held captive (Davis, 2025). Those hopes have not been realised. In February 2025, Khairi Bozani of the Kurdistan Regional Government has confirmed that no Yazidis had been freed from Al-Hol since Assad’s fall (Rudaw, 2025a). As of 2026, there is no systematic, coordinated international effort dedicated to finding those still missing. The International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) conducted a DNA reference sample collection campaign among Yazidi families in Germany in June 2025, an important step toward identifying remains, but it is a slow process given the accretion of unburied mass graves across Iraq (ICMP, 2025).
For women who have survived and returned home, a separate legal injustice awaits. Under Iraq’s National Card Law No. 3 of 2016, Article 26(2), any child born to at least one Muslim parent is automatically and permanently classified as Muslim (Liu, 2025). Because ISIS fighters are classified as Muslim, children born of rape during captivity are legally Muslim, a designation that cannot be changed, as Iraqi law does not permit conversion from Islam. Since Yazidism requires both parents to be Yazidi, these children cannot be accepted into the community. Mothers face an impossible choice: return home and leave their children behind or remain in exile to stay with them. Former US diplomat Peter Galbraith has reunited 29 children with 19 Yazidi mothers across four operations since 2021, but all these families were resettled in Western countries, because the children cannot safely live within the Yazidi community in Iraq (Wallace, 2024; Arraf, 2025). A 2025 article in the Northwestern Journal of Human Rights described this as an enduring genocide, arguing that Iraqi law continues what ISIS began by force: permanently separating mothers from their children and erasing Yazidi identity through the bodies of its own survivors (Xiao Liu, 2025). As Iraqi journalist Khudar Domle put it: what ISIS did by force, this law does by legislation (Liu, 2025).
Iraq’s Yazidi Survivors Law of 2021 formally acknowledged the genocide and created a reparations framework covering financial support, land, healthcare, and education, but implementation has been slow. As of 2025, over 2,300 survivors have been approved for a monthly payment of approximately USD 565 (Rudaw, 2025b). But since 2022, an extra-legal requirement has been imposed that survivors must file criminal complaints before receiving any reparations, a step causing re-traumatisation and significant delays in payment (Human Rights Watch, 2023b). No dedicated rehabilitation centre has been built in Sinjar despite the law’s explicit mandate to do so. The Coalition for Just Reparations’ third monitoring report found shortcomings across nearly every dimension of the law’s implementation (C4JR, 2025).
The Withdrawal of International Protection
On the tenth anniversary of the genocide, in August 2024, a wave of hate speech swept through Iraq and the Kurdistan Region. The trigger was a remark at a commemoration ceremony by a Yazidi Peshmerga commander that some Muslims found offensive. Within days, religious leaders released dozens of videos on social media calling Yazidis “devil worshippers” and calling for violence against them. Yazda, a non-government organisation’s analysis of 62 documented messages found that 21 messages referred to Yazidis as animals, and six explicitly called for gender-based violence against Yazidi women and girls (Yazda, 2024b). The number of threats were so severe that thousands of Yazidis fled their IDP camps in the Kurdistan Region out of fear (Yazda, 2024b). In December 2024, Human Rights Watch and Yazda issued a joint open letter calling on both the Iraqi government and the KRG to act against hate speech and address its root causes (Yazda, 2024c). Hadi Pir, the co-founder of Yazda, put it correctly: without accountability for the genocide and without stable governance in Sinjar, the conditions for renewed violence remain in place (Vetch, 2023).
In this environment, the international community has chosen to withdraw. UNITAD’s mandate ended on September 17th, 2024. The International Bar Association’s Human Rights Institute had already warned in 2024 that closing UNITAD, combined with pressure to close IDP camps, amounted to stripping away the community’s international protection at the worst time (IBAHRI, 2024). Shortly after, on December 31st, 2025, UNAMI, which had operated for over 20 years as the main UN human rights monitoring body in Iraq, also closed. Secretary-General Guterres attended the closing ceremony in Baghdad, calling it the start of a new chapter for Iraq (UN News, 2025). For the Yazidis it marked another layer of protection removed.
In 2025, the US froze significant portions of its foreign assistance budget, and USCIRF found that this made things significantly worse for religious minorities in Iraq, causing a measurable drop in critical services for displaced communities (USCIRF, 2025b).
Conclusion
The Yazidi community has survived genocide, years of displacement, sexual slavery, the destruction of their homeland, and a legal system that continues to separate mothers from their children. They have survived hate speeches and the withdrawal of every international body that was supposed to protect them. What they have not been given, more than 11 years on, is justice, safety, or a real way home. The world did not instantly forget the Yazidis. After 2014, it built mechanisms: a UN investigative team, an assistance mission, displacement camps, a law for survivors, and a reparations framework. These were imperfect, but they were something. Now, one by one, they are being dismantled, not because their work is done, but because political will has run out. UNITAD closed with over a thousand perpetrators identified but unprosecuted. UNAMI closed with minorities still unprotected. IDP camps are being shut while Sinjar remains ungoverned and largely in ruins.
What is needed is not complicated to describe, even if it is hard to achieve. An international court or tribunal should be created with the power to prosecute the planners of the genocide, not just the subordinating perpetrators who have been tried in European cities while the survivors learn about it second-hand in Iraq. Iraq must change the law that permanently classifies children born of rape as Muslim, forcing Yazidi mothers to choose between their community and their own children. Additionally, IDP camps must stay open until families have somewhere safe and liveable to return to, not solely until a government deadline passes. The search for missing Yazidis must be treated with the same urgency as any other hostage situation. And Sinjar needs real reconstruction funding, not merely USD 38 million spread across an entire district that was systematically destroyed, but a serious, internationally backed commitment that matches the scale of the damage.
None of this is radical; it is what was promised and not delivered. The Yazidis have not failed to recover from genocide; they have been failed by the people and institutions that said they would help.
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