From forced conversion to genocide: How Yazidis carry centuries of persecution into exile

ByDANIELLE GREYMAN-KENNARDJULY 18, 2026 19:33From his window in northern Syria, in a rural Kurdish area between Hasakah, Qamishli, and Amuda, “S” could still see the Sinjar Mountains in Iraq, the same mountains thousands of Yazidis fled through in 2014 to escape the mass killings, abductions, and rapes carried out as part of an Islamization campaign led by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.It was that same forced Islamization campaign that led S’s great, great-uncle’s family in Turkey to abandon the Yazidi faith, losing branches of their family in the process. In 1892, Ottoman Sultan Abdülhamid II had ordered the forced conversion of Yazidis, offering them the choice of tashih-i itikad, meaning “correcting” their faith to Sunni Islam, or face execution and/or expulsion.S’s ancestors chose to flee to what is now northern Syria, and generations later, he and his family were forced to run once again from the same Islamist forces, this time to Germany.From his new home in Europe, S told The Jerusalem Post about what he witnessed during the genocide of his people as an emergency worker crossing the Sinjar corridor.At a commemoration ceremony pertaining to the 2014 ISIS genocide, a Yazidi woman displays photographs of missing relatives in Stuttgart, Germany in 2019. Although Germany has offered safe refuge to thousands of Yazidis, many still carry unanswered questions about murdered or missing relatives. (credit: THOMAS KIENZLE / AFP via Getty Images)Fear of openly identifying with Yazidi faithHe also discussed his family’s continued fear of openly identifying with their faith, even now that they live in the West.“This happened many times, and that’s why you can see a lot of Yazidi communities in Russia, Georgia, and Armenia, which are not originally Kurdish or Yazidi places,” he said.He said his mother would always tell him, “We cannot have two generations of ancestors buried in the same cemetery,” a saying that is widespread in the Yazidi community.The Yazidi have faced around 74 instances of persecution and genocide after accusations began in the 16th and 17th centuries that they were devil worshippers.This demonization of the faith stems largely from their reverence for Melek Taus, otherwise known as the Peacock Angel, who is viewed as a shaytan (an evil or demonic spirit) in Islam.“Because for Muslims, the Yazidi have not believed in their [Abrahamic] God. Like in the Jewish or Christian [faiths], they see those people [who do] as kafir [an offensive term applied to infidels],” S said.The Islamic interpretation of the Yazidi faith is what members of ISIS used to justify the enslavement of over 6,000 women and children and the murder of more than 5,000 people, according to figures published by Nadia’s Initiative, a nonprofit organization founded by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Nadia Murad.Syria: Not as safe as Yazidis first believeThough the Yazidi faith is still not recognized as an independent faith in Syria, S explained that many families chose to flee there because Islam was largely separated from the state powers during Bashar al-Assad’s regime.Nevertheless, S said, he was forced to read the Quran at school, and many of his peers went on to convert to Islam after the religion was sold to them by their teachers.It was after the 2014 massacre that S’s family decided, “You cannot fight these people,” a realization that led them to immigrate to Germany.Having just completed a degree in the medical field, S was reluctant to join his family and instead wanted to work with NGOs providing urgent aid across the border. Though he promised his family he would follow them to Germany, much to their dismay, he did not make the move until only a few years ago.It is because of his continued humanitarian work in the region that S asked the Post to keep him anonymous, aware that laws that continue to restrict citizens of Middle Eastern countries from speaking with Israelis may prevent him from carrying out his life-saving work.Under siege: Iraq’s Yazidis in 2014In December 2014, Western and Kurdish forces launched an offensive that allowed a humanitarian corridor to be opened and for ISIS supply routes to be disrupted.The route allowed some access to the mountains in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, where around 400,000 Yazidis had fled, and tens of thousands took refuge on Mount Sinjar, at risk of starvation as they were trapped.Though still “dangerous,” S would cross this trail numerous times with only the bare minimum of medical supplies he needed.The Iraqi and Syrian health systems were crippled by the ISIS attacks. In March 2014, the charity Save the Children reported that 60% of Syrian hospitals had been damaged or destroyed, nearly half of the country’s doctors had fled, and 93% of Syrian ambulances had been damaged, stolen, or destroyed.S was forced to rely on a car converted into an ambulance, without the necessary adjustments or equipment required for effective treatment.“We didn’t have the capacity. The worst time was 2014 in Sinjar ... We were not prepared at all, and suddenly you see more than 100,000 people ... they were almost dying; they were starving,” he said, describing what he had witnessed.Though thousands were violently killed, the majority of the devastation was put down to preventable diseases. The lack of medical attention and the disruption to vaccination programs led to the outbreak of sicknesses like cutaneous leishmaniasis and polio.For S, one of the most psychologically damaging scenes was watching burns develop on displaced people who were forced to wander under temperatures between 40 and 50 degrees.“We didn’t have [anything]. Many people left Sinjar, including the doctors and the nurses, so we were crossing Syria’s border without permission,” they shared. “It was horrible. It also psychologically shocks you for long periods.”Newly graduated in dentistry, S was paired with paramedics and nurses who were unequipped to handle the situation.Adding to the already intense situation, S would regularly come under attack by ISIS terrorists.“ISIS was on both sides [of the corridor] ... It was very, very dangerous,” S said, recounting how members of the terrorist group would launch explosives at their vehicle when they crossed through Sinjar.According to S, the situation worsened after 2015 with the Battle of Sinjar, when Kurdish and Yazidi fighters, supported by Western airstrikes, retook the city.S was based in both Raqqa and Kobani during the offensive, where many terrorist fighters fled: “I went with some colleagues, and we brought medical equipment and medicine to the city.”“At that time, just the city, which is a very small city, was liberated. So all of [the people there] were fighters. The civilians had not come ... it was also horrible,” they commented. “There was no medical staff, no doctors. There were very, very limited capacities.”Turkey’s strikes against Kurds in 2017Making an already difficult situation worse, Turkish forces began military operations against Kurdish forces in Sinjar in 2017, carrying out airstrikes targeting the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and its allied Sinjar Resistance Units.This followed clashes between Assad’s Syrian Arab Army and Kurdish units affiliated with the Democratic Union Party, which had already created obstacles for the Western campaign against ISIS.Despite the many challenges, ISIS eventually suffered a territorial defeat after the formerly US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) liberated Syria.Though defeated, ISIS has continued to traumatize the Yazidi community. Ten years after the devastating attack, a significant portion of the estimated 2,600 Yazidis missing still likely remain at the hands of their abductors in northeast Syria, the Kidnapped Yazidi Rescue Office in Duhok, Iraq, confirmed in 2024.Hundreds of these victims were held by SDF forces in the al-Hol refugee camp alongside their captors, according to Amnesty International.Following the 2026 disruption of the handover of the al-Hol camp to Damascus and the withdrawal of SDF forces, the lack of clarity about their fate remains a major concern.Many Yazidi girls were reluctant to identify themselves before Damascus’s takeover, fearing honor killings or the loss of children they conceived through rape during their captivity. The situation now remains deeply complicated.The world’s response to the crisis, S said, has been tempered by competing priorities. Explaining that people in Germany are sympathetic to human suffering, S said the Yazidi case is still largely unknown, and many are unfamiliar with the region.Germany’s entanglement in the case of Mideast refugees Following the rise to power in Syria of formerly wanted terrorist Ahmed al-Sharaa, Berlin is looking to balance its sovereign interests in managing the refugee crisis and addressing the presence of terrorist networks among asylum seekers, while fulfilling its broader global humanitarian responsibilities.Though more than 4,000 km. away from the conflict, Germany’s absorption of approximately 712,000 Syrians with formal asylum or refugee status, according to figures published by DW News, has meant absorbing some of the sectarian divisions as well.S’s mother has regularly begged them not to identify themselves as Yazidi now that they are living in Germany, fearing they may be targeted.“It’s like it’s a free card for them to go to heaven if they do something to people like us, who don’t believe in their God,” S explained.“I’m totally fine, but many times it’s that you don’t feel very safe when you see a person; it’s not about the skin or so on, but when they are wearing these traditional religious things, I think they are more dangerous. If you are in Europe and you are not integrated, that means you have a very extreme mentality.”Another in-depth Yazidi perspective “G,” a Yazidi member of the Europe-based human rights organization Kurdish-Jewish Alliance, is all too familiar with how the prejudice her community has long faced in the Middle East has followed them into Europe.Born in 1980 in the Kurdish region of Turkey near the Syrian border, G has little memory of the family farm they left behind when she moved to Europe at the age of five.What G does remember are the stories their mother told them about what it meant to be a Yazidi surrounded by Turks and Kurds, as well as the hostility she herself encountered in Switzerland after people learned of G’s faith.Though G identifies as both Kurdish and Yazidi, that identity is itself a complicated one. Yazidis are an ethnoreligious community within the broader Kurdish ethnic group, adhering to an indigenous faith followed by only a small minority of Kurds.An estimated 75% of the Kurdish population adopted Islam, leaving the Yazidis as a distinct religious minority within the community.G said they were able to reconcile the two through the generally secular and inclusive PKK environment, which G’s family joined, though she now struggles to identify with the group, given its strong anti-Israel sentiments.Among the darkest chapters in Kurdish-Yazidi history was the 1832 campaign led by Kurdish Mir Muhammad of Rawanduz, which is estimated to have claimed the lives of around 130,000 Yazidis over a two-year period.Less than a decade later, Bedir Khan Beg, the Kurdish ruler of the Emirate of Botan, launched another campaign that resulted in the killing and enslavement of an unknown number of Yazidis.G said her mother recalled being forced to wait for water because Kurdish Muslims refused to share resources, and of being denied educational opportunities since it was considered too dangerous for her to leave the village.This led the family to retreat to the mountains, where they were embraced by Syrian neighbors who understood only that the family spoke Kurdish and Arabic and had little interest in the religious conflict.When G’s uncle joined the PKK, Turkish authorities disrupted their quiet. The group is considered a terrorist organization in Turkey due to its battle for Kurdish rights and autonomy, which included an armed uprising in 1984.Leading up to the group’s formation in 1978, Turkish authorities refused to recognize Kurdish identity, instead describing them as “mountain Turks” and forbidding them from using their language.The discrimination against Kurds accelerated after the formation of the PKK, leading to Turkish forces destroying many villages that they interpreted as being sympathetic to the militant group.Soldiers imprisoned G’s father, demanding to know the location of his brother, an experience that led her mother to decide they would relocate to Germany.Both her parents would go on to become activists for the Kurdish cause, taking turns exchanging political duties and parental ones. Still, they hid that they were Yazidi.“I can say the PKK is a very modern community; the PKK chief sometimes speaks well about the Yazidi,” G said, explaining why her family would align themselves with a Kurdish group at great personal cost despite the discrimination and historic genocides.G added that she would often ask her father why the family never spoke about being Yazidi, only Kurdish, and her father would answer that it was not the time, as they had to focus their energies against Turkish oppression.“I think he’s afraid of Kurdish Muslim people, because if we say we are Yazidi, then the Kurdish people have a conflict within themselves,” G estimated, referencing the potential damage an internal conflict could create.Today, G is proud to identify as Yazidi, even among their Kurdish friends, who have responded positively and seem less aware of the difficult history. Still, some in G’s wider circle have been angered at her choice to identify first as Yazidi, rather than Kurdish, or for identifying with her faith at all.Recounting one such experience, G said she once told a colleague that she did not observe Ramadan because G was a Yazidi, not a Muslim.Unfamiliar with the term, the colleague later asked family members about the Yazidi faith and subsequently began calling G a kafir who worshipped the devil.Echoing S’s remarks regarding the fact that many in Europe were simply unaware of the plight of the Yazidi people, G said that this was another reason for identifying as Kurdish, as such distinctions were often overwhelming for those trying to understand the cause.Offering an example of this, G said that in 2014, a teacher had tried to connect with her by discussing the war against ISIS, but could not absorb what G was explaining. That difficulty is likely one of the reasons that 12 years on, Yazidis still have not received justice.Follow us on Google