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Seven Years On, Yazidi Survivor Buries Father Slain by ISIS

Thikran Kamiran Yousif, 22, visits his father's grave in Kojo, Iraq February 7, 2021. REUTERS/Thaier al-Sudani
Thikran Kamiran Yousif, 22, visits his father's grave in Kojo, Iraq February 7, 2021. REUTERS/Thaier al-Sudani
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Seven Years On, Yazidi Survivor Buries Father Slain by ISIS

Thikran Kamiran Yousif, 22, visits his father's grave in Kojo, Iraq February 7, 2021. REUTERS/Thaier al-Sudani
Thikran Kamiran Yousif, 22, visits his father's grave in Kojo, Iraq February 7, 2021. REUTERS/Thaier al-Sudani

Thikran Kamiran Yousif was 15 when ISIS militants surrounded his village in northern Iraq, rounded up residents and slaughtered several hundred of them, including his father, brother, grandfather and aunt.

Nearly seven years later, Yousif has returned to the village of Kojo in Sinjar district for the reburial of his father and 103 other Yazidis whose bodies had been dumped by ISIS in mass graves and have now been identified by DNA samples.

Yousif, now 22 and living in Germany, is still haunted by the massacre of August 2014.

"The most painful moment was when they separated me from my father. That was the last time I saw him," Yousif told Reuters.

"To be able, after seven years, to bury (these people) where they were killed... means so much to us," said Yousif, whose other slain relatives have not yet been identified.

ISIS killed more than 3,000, enslaved 7,000 Yazidi women and girls and displaced most of the 550,000-strong community from its ancestral home in northern Iraq.

UNITAD, the UN team investigating ISIS crimes in Iraq, has discovered more than 80 mass graves in Sinjar and has exhumed 19 of them since March 2019. It has so far identified 104 bodies by DNA samples.

You can almost see the territory controlled by ISIS “by the number of mass graves in the area," said Karim Khan, head of the United Nations team investigating ISIS crimes in Iraq (UNITAD).

During the year-and-a-half he spent in the hands of ISIS, Yousif was moved around several times, used as a human shield in Mosul.

"They taught us that killing Yazidis is allowed," he said. "They worked on our minds."

As bombings by the US-led coalition intensified over ISIS-held territory in northern Iraq, Yousif feared he would be killed or forced to fight for ISIS. In early 2016, he fled to Iraqi Kurdistan with his mother and sister.

"In the beginning it was very hard, psychologically. I was confused. I was telling myself that I should not forget what ISIS taught me," Yousif said.

A year ago, Yousif, his mother and sister found refuge in Germany with the help of Air Bridge Iraq, a non-profit organization that advocates for the treatment and rehabilitation of Yazidi survivors of ISIS captivity outside of Iraq.

Iraqi President Barham Saleh and Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi attended an official funeral ceremony for the 104 identified Yazidi victims on Feb. 4 in Baghdad, ahead of the burials in Kojo, which remains in ruins and uninhabited.

A reparation law for female survivors of ISIS captivity is awaiting ratification by the Iraqi parliament, but it excludes men and boys like Yousif who were also held captive.

And the Yazidis are demanding much more, including the legal recognition of their suffering as genocide.

There is no legal architecture in place in Iraq to allow judges to conclude that the conduct of ISIS “constituted an act of genocide, of crimes against humanity or war crimes," Khan said, adding that UNITAD's mandate was to provide evidence to bring the culprits to trial eventually.

About 30% of Sinjar district's population has returned since the departure of ISIS, but the region is still racked by political instability and lacks basic services.

At his father's graveside in Kojo, surrounded by other grieving Yazidis, mostly widows, Yousif said his community simply wanted justice.

"We want the world to see that there is a minority in Iraq that suffers," he said. "We want the world to see us as human beings who have rights just like everyone else."

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Long Silenced by Fear, Syrians Now Speak about Rampant Torture under Assad

People walk through a corridor of Syria's infamous Saydnaya military prison, just north of Damascus, Syria, on Dec. 9, 2024. (AP)
People walk through a corridor of Syria's infamous Saydnaya military prison, just north of Damascus, Syria, on Dec. 9, 2024. (AP)
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Long Silenced by Fear, Syrians Now Speak about Rampant Torture under Assad

People walk through a corridor of Syria's infamous Saydnaya military prison, just north of Damascus, Syria, on Dec. 9, 2024. (AP)
People walk through a corridor of Syria's infamous Saydnaya military prison, just north of Damascus, Syria, on Dec. 9, 2024. (AP)

Handcuffed and squatting on the floor, Abdullah Zahra saw smoke rising from his cellmate’s flesh as his torturers gave him electric shocks.

Then it was Zahra’s turn. They hanged the 20-year-old university student from his wrists and electrocuted and beat him for two hours. They made his father watch and taunted him about his son’s torment.

That was 2012, and the entire security apparatus of Syria’s then-President Bashar Assad was deployed to crush the protests against his rule.

With Assad’s fall a month ago, the machinery of death that he ran is starting to come out into the open.

It was systematic and well-organized, growing to more than 100 detention facilities into which tens of thousands disappeared over more than a decade. Torture, sexual violence and mass executions were rampant, according to rights groups and former prisoners.

A blanket of fear kept Syrians silent about their experiences or lost loved ones. But now, everyone is talking. After the insurgents who swept Assad out of power on Dec. 8 opened prisons and detention facilities, crowds swarmed in, searching for answers, bodies of loved ones, and ways to heal.

The Associated Press visited seven of these facilities in Damascus and spoke to nine former detainees. Some details of the accounts by those who spoke to the AP could not be independently confirmed, but they matched past reports by former detainees to human rights groups.

Days after Assad’s fall, Zahra — now 33 — came to visit Branch 215, a detention facility run by military intelligence in Damascus where he was held for two months.

There, he said, he was kept in a windowless underground cell, 4-by-4-meters (yards) and crammed with 100 other inmates. When ventilators were cut off -- either intentionally or because of a power failure -- some suffocated. Men went mad; torture wounds festered. When a cellmate died, they stowed his body next to the cell’s toilet until jailers collected corpses, Zahra said.

“Death was the least bad thing,” he said. “We reached a place where death was easier than staying here for one minute.”

A member of the security forces for the new interim Syrian government stands next to prison cells at the Palestine Branch, a detention facility operated by the General Intelligence Agency during Bashar al-Assad's regime, in Damascus, Syria, on Dec. 14, 2024. (AP)

Assad’s system of repression grew as civil war raged

After he and his father were released, Zahra fled to opposition-held areas. Within a few months, security agents returned and dragged off 13 of his male relatives, including a younger brother and, again, his father.

All were killed. Zahra later recognized their bodies among photos leaked by a defector showing thousands killed in detention. Their bodies were never recovered.

Rights groups estimate at least 150,000 people went missing since anti-government protests began in 2011, most vanishing into detention facilities. Many were killed, either in mass executions or from torture and prison conditions. The exact number remains unknown.

Even before the uprising, Assad had ruled with an iron fist. But as protests turned into a civil war that would last 14 years, Assad expanded his system of repression. New detention facilities run by military, security and intelligence agencies sprung up in security compounds, military airports and under buildings.

At Branch 215, Zahra hoped to find some sign of his lost relatives. But there was nothing. At home, his aunt, Rajaa Zahra, looked at the leaked pictures of her killed children for the first time – something she had long refused to do. She lost four of her six sons in Assad’s crackdowns. Her brother, she said, lost two of his three sons.

“They were hoping to finish off all the young men of the country.”

A site believed to be a mass grave for detainees killed under Bashar al-Assad's rule is visible in Najha, south of Damascus, Syria, on Dec. 17, 2024. (AP)

Syrians were tortured with ‘the tire’ and ‘magic carpet’

The tortures had names. One was called the “magic carpet,” where a detainee was strapped to a hinged wooden plank that bends in half, folding his head to his feet, which were then beaten.

Abdul-Karim Hajeko said he endured this five times. His torturers stomped on his back during interrogations at the Criminal Security branch, and his vertebrae are still broken.

“My screams would go to heaven. Once a doctor came down from the fourth floor (to the ground floor) because of my screams,” he said.

He was also put in “the tire.” His legs were bent inside a car tire as interrogators beat his back and feet. Afterward, they ordered him to kiss the tire and thank it for teaching him “how to behave.”

Many prisoners said the tire was inflicted for rule violations -- like making noise, raising one’s head in front of guards, or praying – or for no reason at all.

Saleh Turki Yahia said a cellmate died nearly every day during the seven months in 2012 he was held at the Palestine Branch, a detention facility run by the General Intelligence Agency. He said he was given electric shocks, hanged from his wrists, beaten on his feet. He lost half his body weight and nearly tore his own skin scratching from scabies.

“They broke us,” he said, breaking into tears as he visited the Palestine Branch. “A whole generation is destroyed.”

Documents are scattered around Branch 215, a detention facility run by Bashar al-Assad's regime, in Damascus, Syria, on Dec. 17, 2024. (AP)

The mounting evidence will be used in trials

Now comes the monumental task of accounting for the missing and compiling evidence that could one day be used to prosecute Assad’s officials, whether by Syrian or international courts.

Hundreds of thousands of documents remain scattered throughout detention facilities. Some seen by the AP included transcripts of phone conversations; intelligence files on activists; and a list of hundreds of prisoners killed in detention. At least 15 mass graves have been identified around Damascus and elsewhere around the country.

A UN body known as the International Impartial and Independent Mechanism has offered to help the new interim administration in collecting, organizing and analyzing all the material. Since 2011, it has been compiling evidence and supporting investigations in over 200 criminal cases against figures in Assad’s government.

Many want answers now.

Officials cannot just declare that the missing are presumed dead, said Wafaa Mustafa, a Syrian journalist, whose father was detained and killed 12 years ago.

“No one gets to tell the families what happened without evidence, without search, without work.”