You wouldn't believe me if I told you we're all eyewitnesses to genocide.
Genocide is a word that evokes black-and-white images of emaciated Holocaust survivors, stacked-up skulls in the killing fields of Cambodia or Janjaweed warriors kicking up dust as they ride into the villages of Darfur. It is a word that makes us think of unspeakable horrors in distant lands. It is a word we'd like to relegate to the evils of the dusty past, not the circumstances of the day-clear present. It is a word that, applied to any other era, would make us shake our heads and wonder, "What kind of world would have allowed such atrocities to take place?" Now that genocide is happening today, the word should make us squirm.
Yes, genocide is happening today. It happened yesterday and it will continue tomorrow. Secretary of State John Kerry acknowledged as much last week when he declared that ISIS is committing genocide against religious minorities in the Middle East, among them "Yazidis, Christians and Shia Muslims."
Yazidis? The word is so unfamiliar to Western ears that Microsoft Word, puzzled, traces a squiggly red line under it as I type. Presidential candidates bemoan the persecution of Christians at the hands of ISIS. Shia Muslims know well that ISIS has been destroying their shrines and massacring their fellow believers. But who are the Yazidis, and why is ISIS killing them?
The Yazidis are an ethnoreligious group living primarily in northern Iraq. Their religion, Yazidism, is monotheistic and shares some parallels with Christianity and Islam, but it is unique in its veneration of seven angels. According to Yazidi oral tradition, one of those seven angels rebelled against God, fell from heaven, but then reconciled with God and returned to heaven to rule over the world. For centuries, non-Yazidis have wrongly conflated this angel—known to the Yazidis as Melek Taus, the Peacock Angel—with Satan, whose falling out with God is reported in the scriptures of the Abrahamic religions. For this reason, ISIS has labeled the Yazidis "devil-worshippers" and "apostates" and sought to cleanse them from its territory.
I had never heard of the Yazidis until August 2014. Early that month, ISIS fighters surrounded the Yazidi heartland of Sinjar, a mountainous region in northwestern Iraq, and threatened to blot out the Yazidis from the earth. 40,000 Yazidis climbed higher and higher up the mountains that their ancestors had inhabited for centuries, praying for rescue. ISIS fighters, flushed with victory from their conquest of Mosul only two months before, closed in. Only then did the United States act to halt genocide in its tracks.
Yes, the very first U.S. airstrikes against ISIS were launched as a humanitarian intervention, not a counter-terrorism operation. The recent attacks in Paris and San Bernardino have showcased the Islamic State's capacity to organize and inspire terror attacks, yes, but we must note that ISIS has been a humanitarian nightmare since its very inception.
Those airstrikes stand, even by the reckoning of the conservative "National Review" magazine, as one of President Obama's better foreign policy decisions. But they came too late for many of the Yazidis trapped on Sinjar. Yazda, an NGO founded by the Yazidi diaspora in the aftermath of the attacks on Sinjar, estimates that ISIS abducted some 5,000 Yazidis at that time. Men and boys captured by ISIS were commanded to convert to Islam; those who refused were massacred and buried in mass graves. Some 3,500 young Yazidi women were captured and sold into sexual slavery, mainly to the foreign fighters who have streamed into cities like Raqqa and Mosul.
The Islamic State's treatment of Yazidi women underscores a crucial point: a genocide is not only a matter of killing. The 1948 Genocide Convention defines genocide as any of five different acts "committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group." Among the forms of genocide are the straightforward—"killing members of the group"—and the less obvious, including "imposing measures intended to prevent births" and "causing serious bodily or mental harm." The mass enslavement and rape of Yazidi women, as well as the forced contraception and abortion regime imposed upon them by ISIS fighters, constitutes genocide just as much as the mass killing of Yazidi men.
At this point, you may be thinking, "Sure, I agree that ISIS is committing genocide, but how could I possibly be an eyewitness to it?" It's a fair question for such a sweeping assertion.
Unlike the génocidaires before it, ISIS flaunts atrocity. The Nazis marched prisoners out of the death camps and tried to cover their tracks in the waning days of World War II. The Hutu extremists attempted to justify the slaughter of Tutsis and Hutu moderates as a legitimate precaution during a civil war. ISIS puts genocide online. In this smartphone age, all of us can see in real-time what people only a decade ago would have learned about in newspapers or through fuzzy television footage. We are all eyewitnesses to the first high-definition genocide.
Like the Hebrews of old, the Yazidis have found themselves in exile, their women and children taken into captivity, their men and boys slaughtered, their temples destroyed. Once again, the believers of a small and mostly powerless religion must "sing the Lord's song in a strange land." They sit down by the rivers of Babylon and weep. We are only a screen removed from their suffering. Are we close enough yet to weep with them?
Matthew King is a Trinity sophomore. His column runs on alternate Mondays.
Get The Chronicle straight to your inbox
Signup for our weekly newsletter. Cancel at any time.