Pope Francis is scheduled to arrive in Iraq on 05-03-2021 for a historic three-day visit. The Holy Father aims to promote a message of hope and support to thousands of Iraqi Christians who have returned or are yet to return to their homes after the official defeat of the self-proclaimed Islamic State (#IS# ) in December 2017.

The first-ever Pontifical visit will also include stops in Mosul and the Christian enclave of Qaraqosh, in northern Iraq, in a province which has been ground zero for so much violence and ethnic and religious cleansing over the past years. All minorities have suffered in Iraq – but none as much as the Yazidis, slaughtered by the thousands by IS militants. While other minorities have slowly returned home, the Yazidi future remains bleaker than ever.

Yazidism, a monotheistic faith of uncertain origins with elements from Islam, Zoroastrianism and Gnosticism, occupies a unique place in the ethnic makeup of the Middle East. Heretics deserving of execution in the eyes of extremist Islamists or devil worshippers for many others, the brutal massacres of Yazidis in 2014 sparked an international outcry as well as the first US airstrikes in Iraq since the 2003 US-led invasion and occupation of the country.

The Yazidis continued to be massacred, tortured, enslaved and displaced over three years. The violence ended when IS was defeated in 2017 by the combined onslaught of a US-led international coalition along with the Iraqi army, Kurdish Peshmerga forces and a vast array of militias. The Yazidi genocide “must never happen again”, Barham Salih, the Iraqi president, solemnly intoned at a recent official tribute in Baghdad for Yazidi victims whose remains were discovered in Sinjar.

The Yazidis, among the most fragile of Middle Eastern minorities, are a litmus test to understand if coexistence and diversity will have any role in a future Iraq. This ethno-religious minority now risks disappearing. From a Yazidi population estimated at between 500,000 to 700,000 before 2014, of whom around half lived in the Shekhan and Sinjar districts of the Nineveh Governorate in northern Iraq, just over 300,000 Yazidi souls are thought to remain today.About one third live in makeshift refugee camps, with the hope of one day joining the ones who have emigrated to Europe, Canada and the US. Others have either returned home or have settled down in Iraqi cities, mainly Duhok in Iraqi Kurdistan and Baghdad. Nearly 2,800 women are still missing.

Recognition of their genocide from the Iraqi government in November 2014 was an important step forward – but it is clear that weak Iraqi state institutions are failing the Yazidis and other minorities. Almost none of the Islamic State perpetrators of the Yazidi genocide have been brought to justice. Security and reconstruction of Yazidi villages should have been speeded up, together with the rehabilitation of services and job creation. Instead, 60 to 80 per cent of Sinjar city remains badly damaged, as the Nineveh governor Najim al-Jabouri denounced,and 60 per cent of its inhabitants unemployed. In the unpretentious rooms of the Iraqi parliament in Baghdad, the law on Yazidi women survivors, that would provide reparation and integration, has only now been passed, after close to two years of stalemate due to the fractiousness of Iraqi political parties.[1]

=KTML_Link_External_Begin=https://www.kurdipedia.org/docviewer.aspx?id=580985&document=0001.PDF=KTML_Link_External_Between=Click to read Iraq’s Yazidis: Among the World’s Most Threatened Minorities=KTML_Link_External_End=