Iraq’s Sinjar district is beautiful. Bifurcated by the Sinjar mountain range, a 62-mile long series of narrow mountains that rise nearly 3,000 feet above the surrounding plain, it forms a topographic island stretching from the outskirts of Tel Afar to within spitting distance of the Syrian border. It may not be as famous as Ayers Rock (Uluru) in Australia, but it is just as stark and, for the Yezidis who live there, sacred.
As part of a United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees-sponsored delegation, I visited Iraq’s Sinjar district late last year to interview both Yezidis rebuilding after the Islamic State’s collapse and Arab farmers struggling to make a living. Our hosts had one overriding concern: We needed to be back near the Iraqi Kurdish city Duhok before dark. The problem was less remnants of the Islamic State than it was Turkey. At night, Turkey often bombed farms and vehicles traveling in the vicinity of Sinjar. While Turkish officials justified their attacks by arguing they were counterterrorism operations targeting the Kurdistan Workers Party, Kurdish authorities and Iraqi security forces disputed this: The victims of Turkish strikes were overwhelmingly civilian. Local authorities speculated that Turkey simply wanted to disrupt reconstruction in a predominantly Kurdish and non-Muslim area of Iraq.
Sinjar remains a contentious region within Iraq for a variety of reasons. First, with its split Arab and Kurdish populations, it remains among the territories in which control is disputed between the Iraqi central government in Baghdad and the Kurdish Regional Government in Erbil. Then, there are divisions among the Kurds themselves. The Barzanis are the family that rule Erbil and Duhok like a tribal fiefdom. Prior to 2014, they also asserted control over Sinjar. Locals tolerated them, but the Barzanis lost popular legitimacy when they first ignored warnings about the Islamic State and then fled in the face of the onslaught, leaving the Yezidis to their fate. Much as in Syria, the only Kurds who stayed to fight the Islamic State and then worked to rescue Yezidis captured by the group were those affiliated with the Kurdistan Workers Party. While Turkey might say these groups are terrorists, those in Sinjar as in Syria have been occupied with reconstruction and governance and are not involved in their kin’s dormant insurgency across the border in Turkey.
Enter the State Department which, with its naive trust in Turkish goodwill, now threatens simultaneously to throw a match on the Sinjar tinderbox and revictimize Yezidi still reeling from their experience with the Islamic State.
The State Department recognizes, of course, that Turkey’s persistent bombing of Sinjar is a problem, and it gives credence to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s equivalence that Kurdistan Workers Party-affiliated politicians rebuilding Yezidi homes are equivalent to the Islamic State proxies raping girls and beheading their fathers.
Enter Joey Hood, the principal deputy assistant secretary and former chargé d’affaires at the U.S. Embassy in Iraq, who, late last month, briefed reporters alongside David Copley, the deputy assistant secretary for Iraq. “If you could have the Kurdistan Regional Government, the federal government in Baghdad, and Turkey working together with advice and support from the United States and other coalition countries,” he said, “you could see where maybe a place like Sinjar could be cleared out of militias, including the [Kurdistan Workers Party], and you could put a civilian administration in there that would work for the people and be accepted by the people so that Yezidi IDPs, victims of genocide, could actually go home, which they can’t do safely and voluntarily right now. And we are talking to all parties about this at a high level.” Kurdish groups later quoted Hood reiterating the point: “We would like to see Iraq and…
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