The Yazidis, victims of "the biggest case of enslavement this century", say the world has let them down
by James Harkin / March 26, 2015 / Leave a commentPublished in April 2015 issue of Prospect Magazine

Yazidi refugees on Mount Sinjar: in the space of a week at the beginning of August, 40,000 fled up the mountain. © James Harkin
Like every other Yazidi living in the shadow of Mount Sinjar, Nada’s catastrophe began on 3rd August last year. In just a few hours, Islamic State (IS) militants took control of the whole Sinjar area of northern Iraq. In the space of a week, more than 500 Yazidis were said to have been killed, and 40,000 had fled up the mountain, with the help of Kurdish fighters. After a series of United States airstrikes, President Barack Obama made a speech on 14th August declaring the siege of Sinjar over. The following day, the inhabitants of Nada’s village of Kocho were given a final ultimatum by the men from IS.
“You have to change your religion,” the fighters told the people in the village. Even though they were terrified, the villagers refused. Some time later, the fighters came back and reassured the villagers that they would be treated like Christians; in IS’s medieval interpretation of the Koran, Christians are permitted to pay a tax and abide by a series of arcane restrictions in return for protection. “Don’t worry”, they said. “You can take your cars and come to a school near the village. You will be protected.”
It wasn’t true. As would shortly become clear in their online magazine Dabiq, IS had already declared the Yazidis to be devil-worshippers—adherents of a creed “so deviant from the truth” that they would have to be converted to Islam or taken as slaves. Nada and other villagers were transferred to a school outside the village and…