GENOCIDEWATCH

United Nations forensic teams have begun exhuming bodies from mass graves around the northern Iraqi town of Sinjar - home to the minority Yazidi group.

It is estimated that more than 3,000 Yazidis were killed by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL or ISIS) group when they took control of the area five years ago.

The UN says their treatment at the hands of ISIL amounts to genocide.

Al Jazeera's Victoria Gatenby reports.

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In 1944, an anonymous boy detailed the last days of the Lodz Ghetto, writing in Polish, Yiddish, Hebrew and English in the margins and endpapers of a French novel. (Yad Vashem / World Holocaust Remembrance Center)

Young people caught in the crossfire of history provide fearless accounts of the horrors of war—and shatter our complacency in real time.

The writer of these lines was far from alone in dreaming that he might one day t...

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Today, August 3, 2018, marks the fourth anniversary of the genocide perpetrated by the so-called Islamic State (IS) against the Yazidi minority in Iraq and Syria . On this important occasion, Yazda, a global Yazidi rights organization, announces the release of its second comprehensive report on Yazidi mass graves, entitled “Working Against the Clock: Documenting Mass Graves of Yazidis Killed by the I...

600 residents of the village of Kocho remain missing. Photo: Rudaw

DUHOK, Kurdistan Region – Yezidi activists have successfully lobbied the Iraqi government to convert a school in the village of Kocho near Sinjar – known to Kurds as Shingal – into a museum dedicated to the ISIS genocide.

The Iraqi government gave the proposal the go-ahead and even dedicated a budget. Artists in Duhok and Erbil have been invited to design and b...

Upstream projects will produce energy and jobs, but Iraq fears for livelihoods downstream.

They are from different generations, different countries, and live 1,100km apart. Yet the fates of Suleyman Agalday and Nashwa Nasr are intertwined by policies transforming the Tigris River that has irrigated their societies for centuries. Today, both are threatened with displacement.

In south-east Turkey, Mr Agalday, 39, will see the anc...

Iraqi Archbishop Bashar Warda, the Chaldean Archbishop of Erbil  (REUTERS)

Seven months after Vice President Pence vowed to stop funding “ineffective” United Nations-led recovery efforts in northern Iraq and provide U.S. support directly to persecuted Christians and other minorities who suffered ISIS-directed genocide, and are now struggling to reclaim their homes, much of the promised additional U.S. support has not appeared.

A...

Turkish soldiers patrol in Kurdistan Region's Avashin area, Duhok province last month. Photo: Ozkan Bilgin/Anadolu Agency

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region – Turkey has doubled its military presence in the Kurdistan Region to “eliminate terror,” the prime minister said on Sunday. 

“We have doubled our presence in northern Iraq. We have exactly 11 bases. Our aim is to eliminate terror before it infiltrates our soil and to secure our bord...

United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres today announced the appointment of Karim Asad Ahmad Khan of the United Kingdom as the Special Adviser and Head of the Investigative Team established pursuant to Security Council resolution 2379 (2017), to support domestic efforts to hold Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL/Da’esh) accountable by collecting, preserving, and storing evidence in Iraq of acts that may amount...

Early counts show Muqtada al-Sadr has become the unexpected frontrunner. The cleric led the insurgency against US troops after 2003 and later became a strong critic of corruption in Iraq's political system.

Supporters hold a banner with the picture of Muqtada al-Sadr in a spontaneous rally after preliminary results were announced

Iraq's electoral commission released the initial results of the parliamentary elections in the early...

Bazaar in Erbil, 2010. Credit: Martijn Munneke

The Kurdistan Region of Iraq defies easy categorisation and demonstrates various paradoxes. Since 2005, it has been officially recognised as an autonomous region in the Iraqi constitution; but in the aftermath of the 2017 referendum on independence, the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) lost much of its autonomy, and furthermore its territory. KRG officials have pursued neolibe...