Hussein Zainulabdeen

Kirkuk After the Agreement: Has the Conflict Really Ended? By Hussein Zainulabdeen | Independent Researcher — Iraqi Minority Rights | husseinmonitor.com Kirkuk has been called "an ethnic powder keg waiting to explode." In August and September 2023, it came closer to that explosion than at any point since 2017 — and the fuse was lit not by armed groups or foreign interference, but by a political decision made in Baghdad. When Prime Minister al-Sudani ordered Iraqi security forces to hand over a building in Kirkuk city to the Kurdistan Democratic Party, Arab and Turkmen residents took to the streets. Four Kurdish protesters were killed in the clashes that followed. Iraq's Supreme Court halted the handover. The crisis subsided — temporarily. But the underlying conflict did not end. It rarely does in Kirkuk. Why Kirkuk Is Different Kirkuk is not simply a contested city. It is a condensed version of Iraq's unresolved political identity — home to approx...

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...

Born in Captivity: The Children ISIS Left Behind and the State That Refuses to Recognize Them By Hussein Zainulabdeen | Independent Researcher — Iraqi Minority Rights | husseinmonitor.com She was 24 years old, living in an overcrowded displacement camp in Sheikhan, Iraq, looking at pictures of her two children — a six-year-old boy and a four-year-old girl. It had been four months since she last saw them. To come home, she had left them behind. This is the impossible choice that Iraqi law imposes on Yazidi women who survived ISIS captivity and bore children during it: return to your community, or keep your children. The law does not allow both. The Legal Trap Under Iraq's National Card Law, a child born to one Muslim parent — even as a result of rape — must be registered as Muslim. For Yazidi women who were sexually enslaved by ISIS fighters, this means that any child born in captivity is automatically designated Muslim under Iraqi law, regardless of the mother...

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...

Yazidi Women Who Escaped ISIS: Between Trauma and Social Rejection By Hussein Zainulabdeen | Independent Researcher — Iraqi Minority Rights | husseinmonitor.com They survived enslavement. They escaped. They came home. And then, for many Yazidi women who returned to their communities after years in ISIS captivity, the ordeal continued — not at the hands of their captors, but within their own families and communities. This is the part of the Yazidi story that receives far less attention than the abductions, the rescue operations, and the political declarations. The return. And what happens after it. The Scale of What Happened In August 2014, ISIS launched a coordinated attack on the Yazidi homeland in northwestern Iraq. Thousands of women and girls were abducted and traded into sexual slavery across ISIS-held territories in Iraq and Syria. By the most careful estimates, more than 6,000 Yazidi women and children were captured in the initial wave. Years of rescue o...