Introduction

On August 3, 2014, ISIS launched an assault on the town of Sinjar in Iraq’s northern Nineveh province, home to the vulnerable Yazidi religious minority. Approximately 5,000 Yazidis are thought to have been killed during the initial attacks, many in mass executions, with nearly 7,000 Yazidi women and children kidnapped and enslaved throughout ISIS’s so-called caliphate. As ISIS swept through the area, 400,000 were forced to flee to Turkey and Iraqi Kurdistan. An estimated 55,000 Yazidis fled into the nearby Sinjar Mountains, where dozens subsequently died from dehydration and starvation.

The crimes committed by ISIS represent one of the clearest examples of genocide committed in recent memory. The campaign was a carefully orchestrated, pre-planned, and systematic attempt to destroy a minority community, through mass executions of men of fighting age and the mass kidnapping and trafficking of Yazidi women and children into slavery as the “spoils of war.” Apart from the human atrocities, in a textbook campaign of ethnic cleansing, ISIS embarked on the intentional destruction of Yazidi spiritual, cultural sites and temples in Sinjar and Bashiqa-Bahzani. A total of 68 Yazidi temples, shrines, and cultural sites were destroyed.

Many of the surviving Yazidis are crying out for justice for the crimes committed against their community, their families, and friends. So far, justice has not been delivered.

Nobody's Listening

In 2019, Yazda, a global community-led organization formed in 2014 to advocate for minorities and survivors of atrocity crimes, and UpStream launched Nobody’s Listening—an award-winning immersive exhibition and virtual reality (VR) experience to commemorate the Yazidi genocide. It is the first time that VR is being used as a tool to prevent extremism and genocide. Nobody’s Listening aims to ensure that justice for Yazidis and other victims of ISIS’s crimes remains on the international agenda.   

The Counter Extremism Project (CEP) and Nobody’s Listening have partnered to deliver the experience in educational settings. On November 3, 2022, the school program launched with the aim of teaching students across London about the Yazidi genocide. CEP and Nobody’s Listening received initial funding from the United Kingdom’s Home Office through the Prevent Programme, a government-led, multi-agency effort to prevent people from becoming terrorists or supporting terrorism. The Mayor of London’s Office has since provided funding to continue this work.  Click here to watch the video playlist.

Related Resources

CEP continues to support the Yazidis’ demands for justice and accountability for those who perpetrated ISIS’s genocidal campaign. As part of this effort, CEP has sought to highlight the role Western foreign fighters had in the genocide and advocate for international action. See our work below.