No Way Home: Iraq’s minorities on the verge of disappearance seeks to document the situation of Iraq’s ethnic and religious minorities most affected by the violence that escalated after the fall of Mosul in June 2014. It is a follow-up report to Between the Millstones: The State of Iraq’s Minorities since the Fall of Mosul, published in March 2015. Since June 2014, many thousands of persons belonging to minorities have been murdered, maimed or abducted, including unknown numbers of women and girls forced into marriage or sexual enslavement. ISIS forces and commanders have committed war crimes, crimes against humanity and the crime of genocide, including summary executions, killing, mutilation, rape, sexual violence, torture, cruel treatment, the use and recruitment of children, outrages on personal dignity, and the use of chemical weapons. Cultural and religious heritage dating back centuries continues to be destroyed, while property and possessions have been systematically looted. These abuses are ongoing at the time of writing and appear to be part of a conscious attempt to eradicate Iraq’s religious and ethnic diversity. It should also be stressed that as the latest phase in the conflict reaches a two-year benchmark, forces fighting ISIS have also apparently committed human rights and international humanitarian law violations, including Iraqi Security Forces, Popular Mobilization Units and Kurdish Peshmerga. The millions of displaced still remain in camps, and there are no serious returns to areas retaken from ISIS. As of March 2016, internal displacement exceeded 3.3 million. Iraqi sources estimate the total number of those who have lost their homes and are internally displaced at more than 4 million, factoring in those IDPs not registered. Currently, there appears to be no serious Iraqi or international effort to build the political, social and economic conditions for the sustainable return of those who lost homes and livelihoods as a result of the conflict. Militias and unscrupulous local authorities are exploiting this vacuum. This report is called ‘No Way Home’ to highlight the despair Iraqi ethnic and religious communities feel about prospects for return. This perspective is rooted both in a sense of hopelessness about the prospect of return and frustration with the continued deterioration of humanitarian conditions. There is a lack of trust that the government, regional actors, local officials or the international community will provide the necessary support to facilitate returns, locate missing persons, provide justice, facilitate the difficult process of reconciliation and ensure the return of looted possessions and homes. The result will be another Iraqi lost generation, radicalized by homelessness and depredation, repeating the cycle that created ISIS.

The Routledge Handbook of Minorities in the Middle East gathers a diverse team of international scholars, each of whom provides unique expertise into the status and prospects of minority populations in the region. The dramatic events of the past decade, from the Arab Spring protests to the rise of the Islamic state, have brought the status of these populations onto centre stage. The overturn of various long-term autocratic governments in states such as Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Yemen, and the ongoing threat to government stability in Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon have all contributed to a new assertion of majoritarian politics amid demands for democratization and regime change. In the midst of the dramatic changes and latent armed conflict, minority populations have been targeted, marginalized, and victimized. Calls for social and political change have led many to contemplate the ways in which citizenship and governance may be changed to accommodate minorities – or indeed if such change is possible. At a time when the survival of minority populations and the utility of the label minority has been challenged, this handbook answers the following set of research questions.What are the unique challenges of minority populations in the Middle East? How do minority populations integrate into their host societies, both as a function of their own internal choices, and as a response to majoritarian consensus on their status? Finally, given their inherent challenges, and the vast, sweeping changes that have taken place in the region over the past decade, what is the future of these minority populations? What impact have minority populations had on their societies, and to what extent will they remain prominent actors in their respective settings? This handbook presents leading-edge research on a wide variety of religious, ethnic, and other minority populations. By reclaiming the notion of minorities in Middle Eastern settings, we seek to highlight the agency of minority communities in defining their past, present, and future.

On August 3rd, 2014, the Islamic State attacked the Kurdish region of northern Iraq, sweeping down into Iraq’s Nineveh province. Islamic State struck the ancient Yazidi people, citizens of Iraq who had lived in the country’s north for centuries. Within minutes, more than 150,000 members of this pre-Abrahamic faith fled their homes. Fifty thousand sought refuge on the nearby holy Mount Sinjar, a dry, desolate, treeless mountain, where they were stranded, surrounded by the militant jihadists, without food or water in temperatures over 110 degrees. What convinced the Obama Administration and the U.S. military to go back into the quagmire of Iraq after leaving it three years earlier in a hasty pull-out? How did this obscure ethnic group seize headlines and hold the world's attention? How did a small sub-office of the U.S. State Department emerge as a source of crucial intelligence, eclipsing the CIA and the NSA? How were new Yazidi immigrants working from a Super 8 motel in Maryland able to help defeat the warriors of Islamic State on the battlefield? This is the extraordinary tale of how a few American-Yazidis in Washington, DC, mobilized a small, forgotten office in the American government to intervene militarily in Iraq to avert a devastating humanitarian crisis. While Islamic State massacred many thousands of Yazidi men and sold thousands more Yazidi women into slavery, the U.S. intervention saved the lives of 50,000 Yazidis.

Recent precedents from military operations to retake Iraqi cities from ISIS control, including Tikrit, Ramadi, Fallujah and Sinjar, demonstrate a pattern of repeated failures to implement sufficient measures for civilian protection, both in the conduct of hostilities and in planning for the humanitarian consequences. Given this weight of recent practice, it is feared that thousands of civilian lives in Mosul and surrounding areas are now at critical risk.Since 2014, ISIS has deliberately targeted civilians on numerous occasions, but parties on both sides of the conflict, including the Iraqi Security Forces and allied Popular Mobilisation Units, are responsible for: launching indiscriminate attacks, which fail to distinguish between military objectives and civilians or civilian objects; the use of prohibited weapons, and attacks on places of special protection, including hospitals and medical facilities; the recruitment of child soldiers; and the inhumane treatment of detained civilians and fighters hors de combat in violation of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, including murder, mutilation, cruel treatment, torture and unfair trials. Such conduct, together with the imposition of siege tactics on ISIS-held cities and the intensive bombardment of urban areas by Iraqi and international coalition forces, has combined with the ISIS tactic of using ‘human shields’ to result in thousands of civilian casualties and high levels of civilian suffering. The failure to ensure humanitarian access as well as safe corridors for population flight has also been compounded by the imposition on IDPs by Iraqi and Kurdish authorities of discriminatory documentation, screening and entry procedures at check-points and governorate border crossings.

The outbreak of large-scale popular protests in Basra and other Iraqi cities from July 2018 has led to a wave of violent repression of civilian activists. In addition to the use of excessive force against protestors on the streets, there has in recent months been a campaign of systematic death threats and premeditated assassinations. A wide range of civilian activists including protestors, media professionals, lawyers, women in public life and other human rights defenders have been subjected to arbitrary detention, torture and summary killings by militias, including those affiliated to the Popular Mobilization Forces, and by the Iraqi Security Forces and police. Scores of activists have been killed and hundreds detained. While the 2005 Iraqi constitution acknowledges the role of civil society and protects freedoms of expression and assembly, relevant legislation in Iraq is outdated and activists remain highly vulnerable. Official investigations announced into the deaths of activists have been seriously deficient, with perpetrators generally described as ‘unknown’. Lawyers representing activists have themselves been targeted for intimidation or attack. The Popular Mobilization Forces were created in 2014 as an umbrella for militias fighting ISIS. One of the justifications for according official status to the PMF’s 140,000 fighters – including the Badr Organization, Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq and other powerful militias supported by Iran – was to improve discipline and accountability. It has rather consolidated their power and enabled the constituent militias to detain and assassinate critics with impunity. Widespread protests on the streets and at the ballot boxes in 2018 ensured that corruption and failure to provide basic services in Iraq could no longer be ignored. The disturbing rise in the targeting of civilian activists has led many to fear that it may also be the year that marked the return of the death squads. This report recommends that the Government of Iraq should: • Ensure that all Iraqi Security Forces, Popular Mobilization Forces and affiliated militias fall under unified command and control that is accountable to government; • Disband any other armed militias and implement an effective process of demobilization, disarmament and re-integration (DDR); • Conduct prompt, impartial, independent and effective investigations into all instances of alleged assassinations and other arbitrary killings, make the results of such investigations public, and ensure that the perpetrators are prosecuted; • Strengthen the role of the Iraqi High Commission for Human Rights to monitor violations of the rights to free expression and assembly, and attacks on demonstrators, media workers, women’s human rights defenders and other civilian activists. The report also recommends that the UN, donor governments and international development agencies initiate prompt, impartial and effective investigations of corruption in the procurement or delivery of international donor-funded services and development programmes in Iraq.

Ezidi people (Yezidi/Yazidi) and their culture suffered greatly at the hands of Daesh before, during, and after the 2014 Sinjar (Shingal) Genocide. Since the resulting forced migration, the Ezidi ­community as one of the most marginalised societies in the Middle East has undergone a significant amount of society-wide transformation. New avenues for agency have opened, and Shingali Ezidi women have taken these opportunities to express transformed identities, filling spaces previously unavailable, and altering “traditional” gender roles. This first extensive ethnographic work ever conducted with Ezidi women examines origins and developments of transformations in their female identity and agency. The analysis of their expressions and performances is particularly notable because of the subaltern position under numerous layers of minority, e.g. ethnicity, geography, religion, politics, culture, language, as well as gender. The aim of this study is to investigate the utilisation of subaltern identity to actualise agency among women after genocide.