Sinjar: Ten Years After the Genocide — What Has Changed?
By Hussein Zainulabdeen | Independent Researcher — Iraqi Minority Rights | husseinmonitor.com
On August 3, 2014, ISIS launched a coordinated attack on Sinjar. Within days, approximately 5,000 Yazidi men had been executed. Around 6,800 women and children had been kidnapped and entered into a system of sexual slavery. The world watched, named it genocide, and promised that things would be different.
Ten years later, the question is not whether things have changed. Some things have. The question is whether the change has been enough — and honest accounting of the answer is uncomfortable.
What Has Changed
The most significant change is the defeat of ISIS as a territorial entity. The group that controlled nearly a third of Iraq no longer holds Sinjar. Iraqi security forces, with international support, retook the city in November 2015. That is not nothing. For the survivors still alive, the immediate threat of enslavement and execution at the hands of ISIS has ended.
The 2021 Yazidi Survivors Law represented a legal acknowledgment of genocide — the first time the Iraqi state formally recognized what happened to the Yazidi community and created a framework for reparations. Some survivors have received compensation. A Yazidi Genocide Memorial was inaugurated in Solagh, Sinjar, in November 2023, providing a space for mourning and remembrance.
In European jurisdictions — Germany, Sweden, France — prosecutions of ISIS members have produced convictions, including three for genocide in Germany alone. The international legal framework has moved, however slowly.
These are real. They matter. They are not enough.
What Has Not Changed
Ten years after the genocide, more than 200,000 Yazidis remain displaced — scattered across camps in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, living in conditions that the International Organization for Migration describes as precarious. They are not returning because they cannot.
Sinjar largely remains in ruins. According to IOM, 80% of public infrastructure and 70% of homes in Sinjar were destroyed. Many remain unlivable. The federal Iraqi government and the Kurdistan Regional Government continue to contest control over the area — meaning that reconstruction authority, security arrangements, and administrative governance remain disputed. Yazidis are caught between competing political actors whose interest in Sinjar is strategic, not humanitarian.
The Sinjar Agreement, signed in October 2020 between Baghdad and Erbil, was supposed to resolve governance, security, and administrative arrangements that would enable return. As of 2024, it has been halted. The EU called for its implementation. It has not happened. And its stalemate risks another armed confrontation between competing factions — including PKK-linked groups — that could once again displace Yazidis who have managed to return.
More than 2,000 Yazidi men and women remain in captivity or missing as of 2024. Ten years after the genocide, they have not come home.
The Missing
The number that defines this anniversary more than any other: over 2,700 Yazidis still listed as missing. Some are dead — their remains in mass graves that have not yet been excavated, or in locations that remain unknown. Some may be alive, held in conditions that have not been adequately investigated since ISIS's territorial defeat.
UNITAD, which closed in September 2024, excavated 68 mass grave sites. Thousands of victims identified. Thousands more still unidentified. The closure of UNITAD did not complete the work of accounting for the missing — it ended the international body most capable of doing so.
For families waiting ten years for news of a daughter, a sister, a mother — the tenth anniversary is not a milestone of progress. It is another year added to an absence that has no end in sight.
The Camp Closure Crisis
In January 2024, the Iraqi government adopted a decision to close all IDP camps in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq by July 31, 2024. The vast majority of IDPs in the KRI are Yazidis — meaning the decision was effectively a policy directed at the Yazidi community's displacement.
The government offered payments and employment contracts to encourage return. Researchers who spoke with displaced Yazidis found that they felt unable to return to the dangerous, destroyed conditions in Sinjar — regardless of financial incentives. Return requires security, infrastructure, and the absence of competing armed groups. Payments do not create those conditions.
The camp closure deadline came and went without full implementation — but the pressure on displaced Yazidis to accept an unsafe return or lose the limited services available in camps has intensified. Climate change adds another dimension: a CARE study found that changing weather patterns in Sinjar make agricultural livelihoods — the economic foundation of Yazidi life before 2014 — increasingly unsustainable, even for those who manage to return.
The Political Dimension
The tenth anniversary of the Yazidi genocide coincided with Iraqi Prime Minister Al-Sudani's first visit to the White House. President Biden and Al-Sudani reiterated their "commitment to the lasting defeat of ISIS." The language of commemoration was present. The substantive commitments were less clear.
The Wilson Center noted that the security conditions in Sinjar were "teetering on the brink of another severe conflict." The pursuit of justice was "constrained." Close to two-thirds of the Yazidi population remained displaced. The closure of UNITAD was imminent. These are not the indicators of a situation moving toward resolution.
They are the indicators of a situation being managed — commemorated on anniversaries, mentioned in bilateral meetings, acknowledged in UN statements — while the structural conditions that prevent return remain unaddressed.
The Resilience That Deserves More
What is striking about the Yazidi community a decade after the genocide is not primarily the failure of institutions — though that failure is real and documented. It is the resilience of a community that has survived genocide, displacement, poverty, and institutional abandonment, and continues to advocate for its own future.
Yazidi civil society organizations have documented crimes, supported prosecutions in European courts, advocated for the Survivors Law, and maintained cultural and religious life under conditions of displacement that would have erased many communities. The genocide memorial at Solagh was built. The cases in Germany were won.
This resilience deserves a response that matches it — not annual commemorations that acknowledge suffering without delivering the security, reconstruction, accountability, and return conditions that would make the commemorations meaningful.
Conclusion
Ten years after the Yazidi genocide, the honest answer to "what has changed?" is: the immediate threat has ended, some legal progress has been made, some survivors have received partial compensation — and 200,000 people remain displaced, 2,700 remain missing, Sinjar remains destroyed, and the institutions most capable of delivering justice have closed.
That is not enough. It was never going to be enough. And the tenth anniversary, marked with statements and commemorations and bilateral meetings, will not make it enough.
What the Yazidi community needs at ten years is not more recognition. It has been recognized. It needs implementation — of the Sinjar Agreement, of the Survivors Law, of the reconstruction commitments, of the accountability processes that were promised and have not been delivered.
Ten years is a long time to wait for promises to become reality. The eleventh year should not look like the tenth.
Independent Research & Analysis
Hussein Monitor
Hussein Monitor publishes in-depth field research on Iraqi minority rights, post-ISIS accountability, and the human cost of impunity. By Hussein Zainulabdeen — former UNAMI Liaison Officer and independent researcher.
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