According to Yazidi tradition, when the peacock angel first arrived on earth he coloured all things with the vibrancy of his feathers. Yet under heavy grey skies, the rain fell relentlessly on the outskirts of Dohuk city in northern Iraq, creating tracks of thick brown mud. Here a 15-strong Yazidi family, three generations together, sheltered in a half-finished building lent to them by local Christians. Until Islamic State arrived in their village under the Sinjar mountain in December 2014, they were tomato farmers, living a life that had been much unchanged for centuries. The rest of the world had little to do with them and they had little to do with the rest of the world. They didn’t marry out and outsiders didn’t marry in. That was the Yazidi way. But Isis regarded them as devil worshippers.
On Monday, the US House of Representatives voted unanimously to classify what Isis did to the Yazidis as genocide. For this family, they were empty words. It wasn’t the west, they say, but the PKK, the armed wing of the Kurdistan Workers’ party, that led them to safety, carrying women on their backs and giving them bread and water as they fled into the mountain. To the west, the leftist PKK is a terrorist organisation – and it was a breakaway faction of the PKK that claimed responsibility for Sunday’s bombing in Ankara. But to these Yazidis the PKK are heroes who literally held their hands in their darkest hour and led them to safety.
The vexed question is whether the Yazidis will return home now that their area has been liberated from Isis. Many, especially the young, have sought a new life in Germany. But this family wants the community to come back together. However, they also recognise that it may never be safe again. For it was many of their Arab Sunni neighbours who welcomed Isis in. It was the same people they said good morning to every day who stood by as Isis dragged Yazidi women off into sexual slavery and decapitated their children. The mother of the family, still in the same dress she escaped in, drew her finger over her throat. Her four-year-old granddaughter looked up at her, with a face absent of emotion. She had already seen too much suffering in her short life. No wonder her father has joined the Kurdish peshmerga army. He fights on the frontline against Isis, and spoke of Isis’s recent use of chlorine gas. But he says he’s not afraid. And they need the £350 he gets every three months for fighting. He is now the breadwinner for 15 people.
Many thousands of other Yazidis shelter in refugee camps that pepper northern Iraq, mostly stuck away in the middle of nowhere. I spent an afternoon baking bread in an outdoor kiln with some of the women of the Dawodiya camp, high up in the mountains. It was a much better organised place than, for example, Calais, with rows of prefab huts proudly maintained. But they are miles from work and miles from home. My heart goes out to them.
The place they call home has been seeded with tens of thousands of Isis mines, handmade packages of evil, put together from reconditioned fertiliser and a nine-volt battery. Yazidi homes are full of Isis booby-traps – a mobile phone left on a table wired to explode if any child reaches for so inviting a prize. Open the oven door – bang. Turn on the air conditioning – bang. With Isis having recruited many former Ba’athist military, with long experience of laying mines throughout the Saddam era, these devices are professionally designed and strategically placed. Isis will be killing children long after it has been defeated.
The good news is that Isis is losing the war in northern Iraq. The “liberation” of Mosul, Iraq’s second city, gets ever closer. The bad news is that the social forces that created Isis remain unchallenged – not least Arab Sunni resentment at the Shia-dominated government of Baghdad and the structure of independent Sunni mosques that have no allegiance to anything or anyone beyond their own sectarian preaching. Which means that a successor to Isis’s reign of terror is just as likely to spring up when it disappears. Meanwhile, the Yazidis remain stranded in exile and, despite fancy speeches in the House of Representatives, with little prospect of returning home.
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