Nadia Murad's Statement on Burial of 104 Yazidi Victims of Genocide in Sinjar

Nadia Murad

The remains of 104 Yazidis massacred by ISIS in 2014 will be returned to the village of Kocho in South Sinjar on February 6th. After exhumation last year, the bodies were transported to Baghdad for the purpose of identification and evidence collection. On February 6th, members of the Yazidi community will gather for a burial ceremony to honor the deceased. Over six years after the genocide, the families of Kocho will finally be able to lay some of their loved ones to rest. 

Among the deceased are my friends, neighbors, and two of my brothers. I miss my brothers every day. I am glad to be able to honor them with a proper burial, but my heart remains broken for the thousands of Yazidi families whose loved ones remain in mass graves. Living with this reality is a burden that weighs heavily on the Yazidi community. The longer we wait for exhumations and honorable burials, the more our communal trauma is exacerbated and our dignity denied. 

There is an acute need to identify the rest of the remains that have been exhumed, which include the body of my beloved mother. There are dozens of mass graves in Sinjar that still await exhumation. Exhumations and burials for all Yazidi victims of genocide should be expedited out of respect for the deceased and survivors.

We need not wait for burial ceremonies to honor the departed; we can do so now by pursuing justice. In 2016, the United Nations acknowledged that the crimes perpetrated against Yazidis constitute a genocide. My friend, Barrister Amal Clooney, and I worked with member states at the United Nations to pass a Security Council Resolution that resulted in the creation of UNITAD. Since then, the UNITAD Team has collected evidence of ISIS’s atrocities. Now, it is the responsibility of the Iraqi government and international community to act on this evidence by prosecuting ISIS perpetrators for their crimes against humanity.

The attack on Kocho was perpetrated by invading militants and ISIS recruits who joined from villages neighboring our own. The majority of these perpetrators have yet to be identified, arrested, and tried. Instead, they continue to walk free and haunt my community’s dreams of safety and security in our homeland.

It is not enough for ISIS fighters to be tried as terrorists. ISIS deployed a calculated genocide against Yazidis by massacring civilians, conscripting boys, and sexually enslaving women and girls. These are not solely tactics of terror. These atrocities were committed with the intention of eradicating the Yazidi people. If the crimes of genocide and sexual violence go unadjudicated and unpunished, the precedent of impunity will threaten the security and human rights of minority groups everywhere.

For survivors from Kocho and Yazidis across the region, ISIS’s violence is still a lived reality. We feel that violence in the absence of the 2,800 women and children still in captivity. We feel it in the cramped conditions of IDP camps and among the rubble that was once our homes. But we also feel the perseverance of our community and the persistence of our faith and values. 

It is those values, shared by peoples around the world, that drive us to stand for our dignity and human rights in the face of persecution and indifference. I hope that as we gather to finally lay our family members to rest, we will reaffirm our commitment to those values by promoting human rights and justice for all Yazidis.