THE ENDURING GENOCIDE AGAINST THE YAZIDIS: How Iraq's Law on Religious Identity Violates the Human Rights of Yazidi Survivors of ISIS Captivity and Their Children Born of Sexual Violence

2024 marked the ten-year anniversary of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) genocide against the Yazidis—an ethnoreligious minority community indigenous to northwest Iraq. Beginning in August 2014, ISIS executed between 3,000 and 5,000 Yazidi men and elderly Yazidi women and buried them in mass graves, kidnapped and converted young Yazidi boys to a radical form of Sunni Islam and pressed them into military service, and captured or trafficked over 6,800 Yazidi women and children, subjecting many of them to sexual violence. ISIS carried out its intent to eradicate the Yazidis through systematic murder, forced conversion, and sexual violence with brutal intensity and on a shocking scale. The horrific acts perpetrated by the terrorist group against the Yazidis have been recognized as genocide by the United Nations, the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and many other countries around the world. While ISIS was defeated in Iraq in 2017, and the Iraqi government and non-governmental organization (NGO) groups have made progress in rebuilding the Yazidi homeland in Sinjar, several hundred Yazidi survivors of conflict-related sexual violence—many with children born from their time in captivity—are unable or unwilling to return, forcing them to languish in displaced persons camps in northern Iraq and Syria to this day. And while the Yazidi Supreme Spiritual Council has publicly welcomed back female survivors of sexual violence, some members of the community have been less accepting of the children born in captivity to ISIS fathers—in large part because of a 2016 law designating these children as Muslim. This article examines the harsh impacts of the National Card Law on Yazidi mothers, who gave birth in ISIS captivity, and on their children through the lens of international human rights law. In hindering these women from returning to their homeland of Sinjar with their children and in preventing this new generation from carrying on the Yazidi religion, the National Card Law violates their fundamental human rights under international treaties and the Iraqi Constitution and perpetuates the devastating effects of ISIS’s genocide against the Yazidis.