By Nisan Ahmado
Source - Voice of America (VOA)
Affected communities

Saib Khidr, a Yazidi lawmaker and a member of the legal committee that drafted the law, told VOA the Yazidi community agreed the law needed to be more inclusive of other IS victims, particularly other minority groups in Iraq. He said naming the law after Yazidi female victims, however, signifies the plight of the women who were taken as sex slaves by IS militants.
“We want at least to name the law the ‘Yazidi Female Survivors Law’ as a moral support to Yazidi women who faced atrocities by IS,” Khidr told VOA.

Khidr said the law aims to provide financial compensation for female survivors while also addressing other more sensitive issues, such as dealing with children who were the results of IS rape. “While the bill is debated inside the Iraqi parliament, we will be holding workshops with Yazidi survivors and activists to improve different articles of the law,” he said.

If approved, the draft bill would provide Yazidis who survived the IS massacre with financial support, health care, work opportunities, education, rehabilitation, and reconstruction in their villages and towns. With the establishment of a special governmental department for Yazidi affairs, the bill would represent the first recognition in Iraqi history of the minority as a distinct group.
Yazidis are an ethno-religious minority of about 550,000 people, mostly residing in Sinjar, in northern Iraq. IS in 2014 attacked their communities, killing thousands of men and taking thousands of women and children, in an atrocity the U.N. said amounted to genocide. IS reportedly used the women and girls as sex slaves and brainwashed the boys to become suicide bombers.

Justice

Following the death of IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in October 2019, Yazidi female survivor and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Nadia Murad urged the world to hold IS extremists accountable for their crimes against different communities, specifically atrocities against Yazidis and Christians.
Murad called for the creation of tribunals similar to the Nuremberg tribunals after World War II that brought Nazi war criminals to justice. However, Yazidi activists say no progress has been made in Iraq to establish such special tribunals to hold IS accountable. They say such an action faces obstacles such as legal implications for Iraq in dealing with the alleged war crimes committed by IS against Yazidis. “The Iraqi law is not fully equipped with all the legal tools to deal with crimes against humanity, war crimes and genocide,” Hussam Abdullah, executive manager of the Yazidi Organization for Documentation, told VOA.

Abdullah’s organization is collecting evidence of IS crimes, and works with legislative, executive and judicial authorities in Iraq to find a way to properly address the IS attacks against Yazidis and other minorities. In order to overcome the shortcomings in Iraq law, he said the best approach forward was to create an international mechanism to protect the dignity of the victims and their families. “We document survivors’ testimonies to ensure justice in the future and to support the Iraqi government’s work, while protecting this file from being torn apart between political disagreements,” Abdullah said.