Yazidis who suffered genocide are fleeing again, but this time not from Islamic State

Posted Tuesday, March 21, 2017 5:12 pm

SINJAR, Iraq — Relatives collapsed in grief as the coffin of an 18-year-old Yazidi fighter was carried to a small temple at the base of Mount Sinjar.

Salam Mukhaibir's death this month, along with four other Yazidi fighters, marked the latest dark turn for an Iraqi minority sect that has suffered genocide at the hands of the Islamic State.

But the men were not killed fighting the militants. They died in clashes with Kurdish peshmerga forces when long-simmering rivalries erupted.

The Islamic State overran the town of Sinjar and its surroundings 21/2 years ago, executing thousands of Yazidi men, whom it considers apostates. Thousands of women who were kidnapped to be used as sex slaves and their children remain missing.

But the fierce infighting among forces ostensibly meant to be battling the militants now threatens to set back efforts to recapture more land and rebuild areas reduced to rubble.

The conflagration presents a challenge for the United States, which plays a role supporting both Kurdish factions involved - providing military assistance to them, or their affiliates, in the fight against the Islamic State. It also marks a bleak bellwether for the prospects of peace after territory is finally won back from the Islamic State. In neighboring Syria, U.S. troops have already been diverted to prevent warring between rival forces they support.

At a strategic crossroads between Syria, Turkey and Iraq, the traditional Yazidi heartland has become a flash point for Kurdish political rivalries, fueled by the wider competing interests of Turkey, Iran and the Iraqi government in Baghdad.

"We feel like a toy in the hands of the politicians," Khalaf Bahri, a Yazidi religious sheikh, said before performing the burial rites for the young man, whose body was carried to a cemetery on the mountainside. "Yazidis are wounded and still bleeding. We still have our sisters and daughters and wives in the hands of Islamic State, but now this."

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The slain Yazidi fighters belonged to the Sinjar Resistance Units, a local force affiliated with the military wing of the Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK, a separatist group from neighboring Turkey. The United States has been providing arms to a coalition of forces over the border in Syria led by another PKK affiliate. Some fighters with the Yazidi group carried U.S.-made M-16 rifles. They said the firearms were captured from Islamic State militants or purchased on the black market.

On the other side of the confrontation was the Rojava Peshmerga, largely Syrian Kurds under the command of Kurdistan's regional government, which the U.S.-led coalition is also supporting in its fight against the Islamic State. They fled to Iraq at the beginning of Syria's civil war and have been blocked from returning home.

Both sides accuse the other of shooting first.

Kurdish President Masoud Barzani has repeatedly asked the PKK to leave Iraq. But many Yazidis credit the group with saving them when peshmerga forces charged with protecting them abandoned their posts with little fight during the Islamic State's onslaught in 2014.

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Tens of thousands of Yazidis became trapped atop Mount Sinjar as they sought refuge there. Those who did not make it ended up as Islamic State captives or were killed and thrown into one of the dozens of mass graves that surround the mountain.

The plight of those stuck on the mountain and surrounded by militants sparked the first aerial bombardment in Iraq by the U.S.-led coalition against Islamic State fighters. But it was the PKK and its Syrian affiliate that fought to open a land route to allow Yazidis to escape on foot.

Since then, the PKK has put down roots, opening schools and training Yazidi fighters. Pictures of Abdullah Ocalan, the group's figurehead, are ubiquitous in the area. A shrine on the mountainside, illuminated at night, is dedicated to more than 200 fighters from the PKK and aligned factions who died fighting here.

To Kurdistan's semiautonomous government in northern Iraq, Sinjar is an integral part of its territory. The Iraqi government disputes that claim. Many Yazidis consider themselves ethnically Kurdish.

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After Kurdish forces recaptured the town a year and a half ago, Barzani said in a triumphant speech from the mountainside that the Kurdish flag would be the only one to fly there. Since then, his party has expanded its influence, but the PKK has stayed put.

"We are vulnerable and in a weak position, so whoever gives us a piece of bread, a house, a weapon - people will take it," said Bahri, the Yazidi sheikh at the funeral, who is aligned with Yazidi-PKK forces. "Our leaders have sold themselves for money."

'We have been betrayed'

As the rival sides vie for influence, thousands of Yazidis who took up arms against the Islamic State have also joined the peshmerga.

Hayder Shesho, who heads a force of Yazidi fighters, is integrating 1,000 of them into peshmerga ranks.

Shesho said he has decided to merge his forces with the peshmerga because it was the "only open door." He said he was arrested in 2015 in what he describes as an attempt to "pressure" him.

"Yes, we have been betrayed by them. Yes, we have been abandoned by them," he said of the Kurdish regional government's ruling party. "But we are Kurds."

He said the U.S.-led coalition should "take responsibility" and unite Yazidis, calling for international forces to protect them. "No one represents the Yazidis," he lamented.