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."



The US Election by Numbers

Clark County Election Workers inspect mail-in ballots for the 2024 Election at the Clark County Election Department in North Las Vegas, Nevada, USA, 02 November 2024. (EPA)
Clark County Election Workers inspect mail-in ballots for the 2024 Election at the Clark County Election Department in North Las Vegas, Nevada, USA, 02 November 2024. (EPA)
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The US Election by Numbers

Clark County Election Workers inspect mail-in ballots for the 2024 Election at the Clark County Election Department in North Las Vegas, Nevada, USA, 02 November 2024. (EPA)
Clark County Election Workers inspect mail-in ballots for the 2024 Election at the Clark County Election Department in North Las Vegas, Nevada, USA, 02 November 2024. (EPA)

Swing states, electoral college votes, candidates up and down the ballot, and millions of potential voters: Here is the US election, broken down by numbers.

- Two -

Several independents ran -- and at least one, Robert F. Kennedy Jr, stumbled into a number of eyebrow-raising headlines.

But in the end, the presidential race comes down to a binary choice, with the two candidates from the major parties -- Democrat Kamala Harris and Republican Donald Trump -- seeking to lead a polarized America.

- Five -

November 5 -- Election Day, traditionally held on the Tuesday following the first Monday in November.

- Seven -

The number of swing states -- those which don't clearly favor one party over the other, meaning they are up for grabs.

Harris and Trump are courting voters in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, concentrating their campaign efforts there in a push to ensure victory.

In a razor-tight election, just a handful of votes in any of those states could decide the outcome.

- 34 and 435 -

Voters won't just decide the White House occupant on Election Day -- they will also hit refresh on the US Congress.

Thirty-four Senate seats and all 435 spots in the House of Representatives are up for grabs.

In the House, members serve a two-year term. Republicans currently have the majority, and Harris's Democrats will be hoping for a turnaround.

In the Senate, 34 seats out of 100 are available, for a six-year term. Republicans are hoping to overturn the narrow Democratic majority.

- 538 -

Welcome to the Electoral College, the indirect system of universal suffrage that governs presidential elections in the United States.

Each state has a different number of electors -- calculated by adding the number of their elected representatives in the House, which varies according to population, to the number of senators (two per state).

Rural Vermont, for example, has just three electoral votes. Giant California, meanwhile, has 54.

There are 538 electors in total scattered across the 50 states and the District of Columbia. To take the White House, a candidate must win 270 votes.

- 774,000 -

The number of poll workers who made sure the 2020 election ran smoothly, according to the Pew Research Center.

There are three types of election staff in the United States.

The majority are poll workers -- recruited to do things like greet voters, help with languages, set up voting equipment, and verify voter IDs and registrations.

Election officials are elected, hired or appointed to carry out more specialized duties such as training poll workers, according to Pew.

Poll watchers are usually appointed by political parties to observe the ballot count -- expected to be particularly contentious this year, thanks to Trump's refusal to agree to unconditionally accept the result.

Many election workers have already spoken to AFP about the pressure and threats they are receiving ahead of the November 5 vote.

- 75 million -

As of November 2, more than 75 million Americans had voted early, according to a University of Florida database.

Most US states permit in-person voting or mail-in voting to allow people to deal with scheduling conflicts or an inability to cast their ballots on election day itself on November 5.

- 244 million -

The number of Americans who will be eligible to vote in 2024, according to the Bipartisan Policy Center.

How many of those will actually cast their ballot remains to be seen, of course. But the Pew Research Center says that the midterm elections of 2018 and 2022, and the presidential vote of 2020, produced three of the highest turnouts of their kind seen in the United States in decades.

"About two-thirds (66 percent) of the voting-eligible population turned out for the 2020 presidential election -- the highest rate for any national election since 1900," Pew says on its website.

That translated to nearly 155 million voters, according to the Census Bureau.