Hussein Monitor | Iraqi Minority Rights Research

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 ensl...

Iraq's IDP Camps: Open Prisons for a Million People By Hussein Zainulabdeen | Independent Researcher — Iraqi Minority Rights | husseinmonitor.com Nearly a decade after ISIS swept through northern Iraq, approximately 1.2 million Iraqis remain internally displaced. Ninety percent of them have not been able to return home for more than three years. Seventy percent have been displaced for more than five years. These are not refugees fleeing a war that is still happening. They are people trapped — unable to go back, unable to move forward — in a limbo that the Iraqi government has decided to resolve not by fixing the conditions that make return impossible, but by closing the camps and calling the problem solved. The Scale of Displacement As of early 2023, more than 173,000 internally displaced persons were living in 26 formal camp locations across Iraq. Another 983,000 were living in urban settings — informal displacement that is harder to count and easier to ignore....

The Shabak and Mandaeans: Iraq's Forgotten Minorities By Hussein Zainulabdeen | Independent Researcher — Iraqi Minority Rights | husseinmonitor.com When the world talks about Iraq's minorities, it usually means Christians and Yazidis. Occasionally Turkmen. Rarely Shabak. Almost never Mandaeans. This is not because the Shabak and Mandaean communities have suffered less. It is because they have fewer advocates, less international visibility, and no powerful diaspora community lobbying on their behalf. In the hierarchy of attention that governs humanitarian response, they occupy the lowest rung — and they are paying the price for it. Who Are the Shabak? The Shabak are an ethnic and linguistic minority concentrated in the Nineveh Plains east of Mosul — a community whose name derives from the Arabic word for "intertwining," reflecting a heritage woven from multiple traditions. They speak a language that blends Arabic, Farsi, Kurdish, and Turkish. Appro...

Tal Afar After Liberation: A City Without a Future? By Hussein Zainulabdeen | Independent Researcher — Iraqi Minority Rights | husseinmonitor.com When Iraqi forces declared Tal Afar fully liberated from ISIS on September 1, 2017, the celebrations were real. A city that had suffered three years of occupation — massacres, displacement, destruction — was finally free. The Iraqi flag flew again over the ancient Turkmen city in western Nineveh. Five years later, the question is no longer whether Tal Afar was liberated. It is whether liberation meant anything at all for the people who lived there. What ISIS Did to Tal Afar Tal Afar fell to ISIS on June 16, 2014. The city's population — largely Shia and Sunni Turkmen, numbering around 200,000 to 225,000 — was shattered almost overnight. Most fled. Some Sunni Turkmen remained, and a number became implicated in ISIS's war crimes — a wound that still cuts through communal relations today. The Shia Turkmen community...