Will Yazidi women get justice?
Thousands were abducted and are missing, but the perpetrators are in legal limbo, says Alex Crawford
Sky News
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Kovan looks frail when we meet, but her courage and resilience are astounding. Inside is the heart of a lioness, a woman who has learnt how to survive what most of us would find utterly intolerable.
When Kovan was first abducted by Isis in 2014, she hadn’t even begun to menstruate. “I was a child,” she told me. “How can you do these things to a child?” It is a frankly unanswerable question.
Kovan describes being paraded in front of Isis men at just 14 years old, as they bartered to secure the price to rape or “own” her. She recounts her forced conversion and multiple forced “marriages”; of being raped daily and being told what to do and where to be every waking hour for ten dark years.
In our documentary, Ten Years of Darkness: Isis and the Yazidis, we speak to young women such as Kovan, who somehow survived the most appalling abuse and unimaginable horrors. Her rescue after more than a decade of captivity is at the heart of our film.
It details how, shockingly, Isis groups are still holding Yazidi women as slaves, despite the last sliver of Isis territory being reclaimed by the US-led international coalition in 2019, marking an end to the group’s territorial hold.
The terror group has murdered, abducted and enslaved the Yazidis, a minority ethnic group who come primarily from northern Iraq, while denouncing them as “heretics” under their extreme application of Islamic law. Thousands of women – some of whom were taken while only children – are still missing, with some hidden in darkness, held in captivity by Isis loyalists.
Barely a handful of these men have stood trial for these crimes
For the Yazidis, the trauma and pain are ongoing. And even though the UK government, the US and multiple other countries now officially recognise the 2014 attack in Sinjar, north-western Iraq, as a genocide – more than 5,000 Yazidis were murdered and even more abducted – barely a handful of perpetrators have stood trial for these crimes.
Instead, they are being held in prisons like Panorama in al-Hasakah, north-east Syria. Many of these prisoners – including Britons – were originally detained as suspected Isis fighters, but are also suspected of buying and selling young Yazidi women and girls, and abusing them for years as “slaves”. But the international community has been reluctant to hold them accountable for their crimes.
We were given rare access into Panorama prison to talk to these men no one wants, considered the most dangerous to the West. As the prison door was unlocked for us to enter, two motionless guards wearing balaclavas kept watch. A wave of sweaty air touched the face masks we wore as protection against the tuberculosis outbreak inside. The men held here rarely, if ever, see a lawyer or step into a courtroom, their cases left in legal limbo amid the instability of the region.
Multiple countries, including Britain, are deciding largely to look away. As Ewelina Ochab of the International Bar Association’s Human Rights Institute told me, “The UK has not addressed the crimes perpetrated by its own citizens, with only a small percentage of them being convicted upon their return.”
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What’s more, the seismic events in Syria and the toppling of the dictator Bashar al-Assad have led to concern about Isis regrouping in the power vacuum. Although Sinjar still lies in ruins from 2014, it is once again under threat. Justice for the Yazidis remains elusive.
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