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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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Why Greenland? Remote but Resource-Rich Island Occupies a Key Position in a Warming World

Large icebergs float away as the sun rises near Kulusuk, Greenland, on Aug. 16, 2019. (AP)
Large icebergs float away as the sun rises near Kulusuk, Greenland, on Aug. 16, 2019. (AP)
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Why Greenland? Remote but Resource-Rich Island Occupies a Key Position in a Warming World

Large icebergs float away as the sun rises near Kulusuk, Greenland, on Aug. 16, 2019. (AP)
Large icebergs float away as the sun rises near Kulusuk, Greenland, on Aug. 16, 2019. (AP)

Remote, icy and mostly pristine, Greenland plays an outsized role in the daily weather experienced by billions of people and in the climate changes taking shape all over the planet.

Greenland is where climate change, scarce resources, tense geopolitics and new trade patterns all intersect, said Ohio University security and environment professor Geoff Dabelko.

The world's largest island is now "central to the geopolitical, geoeconomic competition in many ways," partly because of climate change, Dabelko said.

Since his first term in office, President-elect Donald Trump has expressed interest in acquiring Greenland, which is a semiautonomous territory of Denmark, a longtime US ally and a founding member of NATO. It is also home to a large US military base.

Why is Greenland coveted? Think of Greenland as an open refrigerator door or thermostat for a warming world, and it's in a region that is warming four times faster than the rest of the globe, said New York University climate scientist David Holland.

Locked inside are valuable rare earth minerals needed for telecommunications, as well as uranium, billions of untapped barrels of oil and a vast supply of natural gas that used to be inaccessible but is becoming less so.

Many of the same minerals are currently being supplied mostly by China, so other countries such as the United States are interested, Dabelko said. Three years ago, the Denmark government suspended oil development offshore from the territory of 57,000 people.

But more than the oil, gas or minerals, there's ice — a "ridiculous" amount, said climate scientist Eric Rignot of the University of California, Irvine.

If that ice melts, it would reshape coastlines across the globe and potentially shift weather patterns in such a dramatic manner that the threat was the basis of a Hollywood disaster movie. Greenland holds enough ice that if it all melts, the world's seas would rise by 24 feet (7.4 meters). Nearly a foot of that is so-called zombie ice, already doomed to melt no matter what happens, a 2022 study found.

Since 1992, Greenland has lost about 182 billion tons (169 billion metric tons) of ice each year, with losses hitting 489 billion tons a year (444 billion metric tons) in 2019.

Greenland will be "a key focus point" through the 21st century because of the effect its melting ice sheet will have on sea levels, said Mark Serreze, director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado. "It will likely become a bigger contributor in the future."

That impact is "perhaps unstoppable," NYU's Holland said.

Are other climate factors at play? Greenland also serves as the engine and on/off switch for a key ocean current that influences Earth's climate in many ways, including hurricane and winter storm activity. It's called the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC, and it's slowing down because more fresh water is being dumped into the ocean by melting ice in Greenland, Serreze said.

A shutdown of the AMOC conveyor belt is a much-feared climate tipping point that could plunge Europe and parts of North America into prolonged freezes, a scenario depicted in the 2004 movie "The Day After Tomorrow."

"If this global current system were to slow substantially or even collapse altogether — as we know it has done in the past — normal temperature and precipitation patterns around the globe would change drastically," said climate scientist Jennifer Francis of the Woodwell Climate Research Center. "Agriculture would be derailed, ecosystems would crash, and ‘normal’ weather would be a thing of the past."

Greenland is also changing color as it melts from the white of ice, which reflects sunlight, heat and energy away from the planet, to the blue and green of the ocean and land, which absorb much more energy, Holland said.

Greenland plays a role in the dramatic freeze that two-thirds of the United States is currently experiencing. And back in 2012, weather patterns over Greenland helped steer Superstorm Sandy into New York and New Jersey, according to winter weather expert Judah Cohen of the private firm Atmospheric and Environmental Research.

Because of Greenland's mountains of ice, it also changes patterns in the jet stream, which brings storms across the globe and dictates daily weather. Often, especially in winter, a blocking system of high pressure off Greenland causes Arctic air to plunge to the west and east, smacking North America and Europe, Cohen said.

Why is Greenland's location so important? Because it straddles the Arctic circle between the United States, Russia and Europe, Greenland is a geopolitical prize that the US and others have eyed for more than 150 years. It's even more valuable as the Arctic opens up more to shipping and trade.

None of that takes into consideration the unique look of the ice-covered island that has some of the Earth's oldest rocks.

"I see it as insanely beautiful. It's eye-watering to be there," said Holland, who has conducted research on the ice more than 30 times since 2007. "Pieces of ice the size of the Empire State Building are just crumbling off cliffs and crashing into the ocean. And also, the beautiful wildlife, all the seals and the killer whales. It’s just breathtaking."