Yazidis Fear Returning to Homeland, 10 Years after Massacre

Yazidi women raise banners during a demonstration demanding their rights and the release of those kidnapped by ISIS militants, in Mosul, Iraq, June 3, 2024. REUTERS/Khalid Al-Mousily
Yazidi women raise banners during a demonstration demanding their rights and the release of those kidnapped by ISIS militants, in Mosul, Iraq, June 3, 2024. REUTERS/Khalid Al-Mousily
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Yazidis Fear Returning to Homeland, 10 Years after Massacre

Yazidi women raise banners during a demonstration demanding their rights and the release of those kidnapped by ISIS militants, in Mosul, Iraq, June 3, 2024. REUTERS/Khalid Al-Mousily
Yazidi women raise banners during a demonstration demanding their rights and the release of those kidnapped by ISIS militants, in Mosul, Iraq, June 3, 2024. REUTERS/Khalid Al-Mousily

Fahad Qassim was just 11 years old when ISIS militants overran his Yazidi community in the Sinjar region of northern Iraq in August 2014, taking him captive.

The attack was the start of what became the systematic slaughter, enslavement, and rape of thousands of Yazidis, shocking the world and displacing most of the 550,000-strong ancient religious minority. Thousands of people were rounded up and killed during the initial assault, which began in the early hours of Aug. 3.
Many more are believed to have died in captivity. Survivors fled up the slopes of Mount Sinjar, where some were trapped for many weeks by an ISIS siege.
The assault on the Yazidis - an ancient religious minority in eastern Syria and northwest Iraq - was part of ISIS' effort to establish a so-called “caliphate.”

At one stage, the group held a third of Iraq and neighboring Syria before being pushed back and collapsing in 2019.

Now 21, Qassim lives in a small apartment on the edge of a refugee camp in the Kurdistan region of Iraq, far from his hometown.

He was trained as a child soldier and fought in grinding battles before being liberated as ISIS collapsed in Syria's Baghuz in 2019, but only after losing the bottom half of his leg to an airstrike by the US-led forces.

"I don't plan for any future in Iraq," he said, waiting for news on a visa application to a Western country.

"Those who go back say they fear the same thing that happened in 2014 will happen again."

Qassim's reluctance to return is shared by many. A decade after what has been recognized as a genocide by many governments and UN agencies, Sinjar district remains largely destroyed.

The old city of Sinjar is a confused heap of grey and brown stone, while villages like Kojo, where hundreds were killed, are crumbling ghost towns.
Limited services, poor electricity and water supply, and what locals say is inadequate government compensation for rebuilding have made resettlement challenging.

POWER STRUGGLE
The security situation further complicates matters. A mosaic of armed groups that fought to free Sinjar have remained in this strategic corner of Iraq, holding de facto power on the ground.
This is despite the 2020 Sinjar Agreement that called for such groups to leave and for the appointment of a mayor with a police force composed of locals.
And from the skies above, frequent Turkish drone strikes target fighters aligned with the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK). Civilians are among those killed in these attacks, adding to the sense of insecurity.

Akhtin Intiqam, a 25-year-old commander in the PKK-aligned Sinjar Protection Units (YBS), one of the armed factions in the area, defends their continued presence:

"We are in control of this area and we are responsible for protecting Sinjar from all external attacks," she said.

Speaking in a room adorned with pictures of fallen comrades, numbering more than 150, Intiqam views the Sinjar Agreement with suspicion.
"We will fight with all our power against anyone who tries to implement this plan. It will never succeed," she said.

GOVERNMENT EFFORTS
As the stalemate continues, Sinjar remains underdeveloped. Families who do return receive a one-time payment of about $3,000 from the government.

Meanwhile, more than 200,000 Yazidis remain in Kurdistan, many living in shabby tent settlements. The Iraqi government is pushing to break up these camps, insisting it's time for people to go home.

"You can't blame people for having lost hope. The scale of the damage and displacement is very big and for many years extremely little was done to address it," said Khalaf Sinjari, the Iraqi prime minister's advisor for Yazidi affairs.

This government, he said, was taking Sinjar seriously.

It plans to spend hundreds of millions of dollars – including all previously unspent budgets since 2014 - on development and infrastructure, including for paying compensation, building two new hospitals and a university and linking Sinjar to the country’s water network for the first time. "There is hope to bring back life," said Sinjari, himself a member of the Yazidi community.

However, the presence of an estimated 50,000 ISIS fighters and their families across the border in Syria in detention centers and camps stokes fears of history repeating itself.

Efforts by some Iraqi lawmakers to pass a general amnesty law that could see the freeing of many ISIS prisoners from Iraqi jails only add to these concerns. And the Yazidi struggle for justice is stalled, with the government this year ending a UN mission that sought to help bring ISIS fighters to trial for international crimes, citing a lack of cooperation between it and the mission.
Despite the challenges, some Yazidis are choosing to return. Farhad Barakat Ali, a Yazidi activist and journalist who was displaced by ISIS, made the decision to go back several years ago.
"I'm not encouraging everyone to return to Sinjar, but I am also not encouraging them to stay at the IDP camps either," he said from his home in Sinjar city, in the stifling heat of a power cut.



An American Tradition: Defeated Candidates Attending the President-Elect’s Inauguration

Vice President Kamala Harris talks to reporters after overseeing the ceremonial certification of her defeat to incoming President-elect Donald Trump, at the US Capitol in Washington, Jan. 6, 2025. (AP)
Vice President Kamala Harris talks to reporters after overseeing the ceremonial certification of her defeat to incoming President-elect Donald Trump, at the US Capitol in Washington, Jan. 6, 2025. (AP)
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An American Tradition: Defeated Candidates Attending the President-Elect’s Inauguration

Vice President Kamala Harris talks to reporters after overseeing the ceremonial certification of her defeat to incoming President-elect Donald Trump, at the US Capitol in Washington, Jan. 6, 2025. (AP)
Vice President Kamala Harris talks to reporters after overseeing the ceremonial certification of her defeat to incoming President-elect Donald Trump, at the US Capitol in Washington, Jan. 6, 2025. (AP)

In January 1981, Jimmy Carter nodded politely toward Ronald Reagan as the new Republican president thanked the Democrat for his administration's help after Reagan resoundingly defeated Carter the previous November.

Twenty years earlier, after a much closer race, Republican Richard Nixon clasped John F. Kennedy's hand and offered the new Democratic president a word of encouragement.

The US has a long tradition of defeated presidential candidates sharing the inauguration stage with the people who defeated them, projecting to the world the orderly transfer of power. It's a practice that Vice President Kamala Harris will resume on Jan. 20 after an eight-year hiatus.

Only once in the television era — with its magnifying effect on a losing candidate's expression — has a defeated candidate skipped the exercise. That candidate, former President Donald Trump, left for Florida after a failed effort to overturn his loss based on false or unfounded theories of voter fraud.

With Harris watching, Trump is scheduled to stand on the Capitol's west steps and be sworn in for a second term.

Below are examples of episodes that have featured a losing candidate in a rite that Reagan called "nothing short of a miracle."

2001: Al Gore and George W. Bush Democrat Al Gore conceded to Republican George W. Bush after 36 days of legal battling over Florida's ballots ended with a divided Supreme Court ruling to end the recount.

But Gore, the sitting vice president, would join Bush on the west steps of the Capitol a month later as the Texas governor was sworn in. After Bush took the oath, he and Gore shook hands, spoke briefly and smiled before Gore returned to his seat clapping along to the presidential anthem, "Hail to the Chief."

A disappointed Gore accepted the outcome and his role in demonstrating continuity of governance, former Gore campaign spokeswoman Kiki McLean said.

"He may have wished, ‘I wish that was me standing there,’" McLean said. "But I don't think Gore for one minute ever doubted he should be there in his capacity as vice president."

Hillary Clinton smiles wide as she and former President Jimmy Carter, from left, former first lady Rosalynn Carter, former President Bill Clinton, former President George W. Bush, and former first lady Laura Bush wait for the start of the inauguration ceremony to swear President-elect Donald Trump as the 45th president of the United States, at the Capitol in Washington, Jan. 20, 2017. (AP)

2017: Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump Democrat Hillary Clinton was candid about her disappointment in losing to Trump in 2016, when — like Gore against Bush — she received more votes but failed to win an Electoral College majority. "Obviously, I was crushed," she told Howard Stern on his radio show in 2019.

Calling Inauguration Day "one of the hardest days of my life," Clinton said she planned to attend Trump's swearing-in out of a sense of duty, having been first lady during her husband's presidency from 1993 to 2001. "You put on the best face possible," Clinton said on Stern's show.

2021: Mike Pence (with Trump absent) and Joe Biden Trump four years ago claimed without evidence that his loss to President Joe Biden was marred by widespread fraud. Two weeks earlier, Trump supporters had stormed the Capitol in a violent siege aimed at halting the electoral vote certification.

Instead, then-Vice President Mike Pence was the face of the outgoing administration.

"Sure, it was awkward," Pence's former chief of staff Marc Short said.

Still, Pence and his wife met privately with Biden and his wife to congratulate them in the Capitol before the ceremony, and escorted newly sworn-in Vice President Kamala Harris and her husband out of the Capitol afterward, as tradition had prescribed, Short said.

"There was an appreciation expressed for him by members of both chambers in both parties," he said.

1993: George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton Bush stood on the Capitol's west steps three times for his swearing-in — as vice president twice and in 1989 to be inaugurated as president. He would attend again in 1993 in defeat.

He joined Bill Clinton, the Democrat who beat him, on the traditional walk out onto the east steps. Bush would return triumphantly to the inaugural ceremony eight years later as the father of Clinton's successor, George W. Bush.

1961: Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy Nixon had just lost the 1960 election by fewer than 120,000 votes in what was the closest presidential contest in 44 years. But the departing vice president approached Kennedy with a wide grin, a handshake and an audible "good luck" just seconds after the winning Democrat's swearing-in.

Nixon would have to wait eight years to be sworn in as president, while his losing Democratic opponent — outgoing Vice President Hubert Humphrey — looked on. He was inaugurated a second time after winning reelection in 1972, only to resign after the Watergate scandal.

President-elect Ronald Reagan applauds as outgoing President Jimmy Carter waves to the crowd at Reagan's inaugural ceremony, in Washington, Jan. 20, 1981. (AP Photo, File)

1933: Herbert Hoover and Franklin D. Roosevelt Like Bush, Hoover would attend just one inauguration as a new president before losing to a Democrat four years later. But Democrat Franklin Roosevelt's 1933 swearing-in would not be Hoover's last. Hoover would live for another 31 years, see four more presidents sworn in, and sit in places of honor at the two inaugurations of Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower.

1897: Grover Cleveland and Benjamin Harrison Cleveland, the sitting Democratic president, lost reelection in 1888 while winning more popular votes than former Indiana Sen. Benjamin Harrison. But Cleveland still managed to hold Harrison’s umbrella while the Republican was sworn in during a rainy 1889 inauguration.

Elected to a second, non-consecutive term in 1892, Cleveland, however, would stand solemnly behind William McKinley four years later at the Republican's 1897 inauguration, leaving the presidency that day after losing the 1896 nomination of his own party.

Cleveland was the only president to win two non-consecutive terms until Trump's victory in November.