The ISIS genocide of Ezidis in Shingal Iraq in 2014 is widely recognized by the international community.  However, ten years later, the Ezidi community continues to live in fear because there are still no measures in place to prevent another genocide from happening. Ezidis in Iraq remain in danger because the same political actors who collaborated with ISIS to slaughter and enslave Ezidis remain in power in Iraq.  ISIS did not commit the genocide alone. The security forces (Peshmerga) of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) partnered with ISIS to perpetrate the genocide. Kurdish leaders, led by Masoud Barzani, used ISIS as tool to slaughter thousands of Ezidis and expel hundreds of thousands more from their homeland of Sinjar. Iraqi army and rulers that time also remained silent and withdrew without any attempt to protect Ezidi Iraqis.

Barzani’s goal is to annihilate Ezidis and annex Sinjar to make it part of the Kurdistan region and a future Kurdish state.  The next genocide may take place in the Kurdistan region because hundreds of thousands of Ezidi genocide survivors still live in IDP camps there under the Barzani family’s rule  How can we trust the same people to protect us who participated in the genocide against us? The situation is getting worse each day. A campaign of hate speech by Kurds, both in mosques and online, was launched in August of 2024 in which radical Kurdish preachers called for a new genocide.

Below are some of the hundreds of thousands of hate speech comments made online in just a few days following the tenth anniversary of the last genocide.