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Genocide in Iraq: When Local Sunni Became ISIS and Slaughtered Their
Neighbors
By Rania Khalek [1] / AlterNet [2]
October 20, 2017, 7:34 AM GMT
This is the third in a series of articles on the plight of Yazidis in Iraq.
Read the first [3] and the second [4] installments.
On August 3, 2014, the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, orchestrated a
pre-planned and systematic campaign of genocide against the Yazidis in
northwest Iraq, driving hundreds of thousands of them from their ancestral
homeland in Sinjar. Yazidis [5] are a Kurdish-speaking people who practice a
pre-Islamic religion that ISIS ideologues equate with devil worship. All
across Sinjar, wherever Yazidis were captured, the Sunni extremists forcibly
converted or killed the men and enslaved the women and children.
The onslaught sent tens of thousands of Yazidis fleeing to Sinjar mountain,
where they were trapped for days in the punishing Iraqi summer heat. The
dusty and rugged mountainous terrain was their refuge, but for some it
became a tomb. Hundreds, especially children and the elderly, died of thirst
and hunger.
According to Yazidi survivors I spoke to in Baghdad, Sinjar, Erbil and
Dohuk, the 2014 assault was carried out not by strangers, but by their Sunni
friends and neighbors, by people they trusted and considered family. While
much has been documented about the horrors ISIS inflicted on Yazidis, there
has been little examination of how their genocide was made possible by the
cooperation and collaboration of their Sunni neighbors and its consequences
on communal relations going forward. Yazidis are strongly distrustful of
Sunnis. They fear and loathe them and never want to live in a place where
they are outnumbered by Sunnis again.
The genocide of the Yazidis poses a major challenge to the Sunni
marginalization theory, which posits that Salafi jihadist groups like Al
Qaeda and ISIS formed in response to the oppression of Sunnis by an Alawite
regime in Syria [6] and a Shia-dominated government in Iraq [7]. In the
context of the Yazidi genocide, this narrative falls short. Yazidis never
possessed the political power to oppress anyone, certainly not their Sunni
neighbors who had better jobs, larger houses and more political influence
than Yazidis in Sinjar.
Yazidis have an additional explanation for the rise of ISIS. They say an
ISIS-style ideology rooted in Salafism, Wahhabism and Sunni supremacy had
been cultivated among local Sunnis in and around Sinjar over the last
several decades, laying fertile ground for groups like Al Qaeda and ISIS.
Their Sunni neighbors, many of them from large Arab tribes, were just
waiting for the right moment to act. ISIS provided them with an opportunity
and they took it, say Yazidis.
When their high school teachers turned to ISIS oppressors
"Most of ISIS was from our neighboring villages, from people inside Sinjar.
These are people we used to split food with. Some of them were Kurdish
Sunnis, some of them were Arab Sunnis. All of the Arab Sunnis were working
with ISIS. Before ISIS, they were al Qaeda," said Khudaydah, a 68-year-old
Yazidi who has fought alongside both the PKK and the PMF against ISIS in
Sinjar.
One Yazidi woman from the south Sinjar town of Tal Ezeir says she and her
two sisters were kidnapped by their next-door neighbor of 25 years. The men
from the Arab Sunni family next door surrounded them on August 2, just ahead
of the ISIS attack on Sinjar, and wouldn't allow them to leave. When ISIS
attacked in the early morning hours of August 3, the men from the Sunni
family next door handed their male neighbors over to ISIS commanders and
distributed the Yazidi women of the house among themselves. The father, who
was 61 years old, gave the youngest sister to an ISIS commander as a gift
and kept the older two, ages 15 and 18, for himself and his two sons. The
youngest sister managed to escape.
"ISIS were local people," said another female Yazidi survivor, "especially
in the first couple days. Many of them were from Baaj and Tal Afar. Some of
us were students in high school and we recognized them as our teachers," she
said, identifying one of the ISIS guards holding her hostage in Tal Afar as
her high school biology teacher.
My translator, a young Yazidi woman named Vian, took notice of my horrified
expression and explained that such stories were typical. Vian is from a town
in Sinjar called Sinuni. Her high school chemistry teacher, a man called
Esaood from the local Jayash tribe, joined ISIS as well, she said. This was
the norm.
There were countless stories like this about former neighbors and friends
becoming killers. It was reminiscent [8] of the genocides in Rwanda and
Bosnia and the Holocaust [9], where a combination of propaganda,
dehumanization and loyalty to group identity pushed ordinary people to kill
their friends and neighbors.
Other Yazidi survivors described how Sunnis from their neighborhoods joined
ISIS in hunting them as they fled to Sinjar mountain on August 3, helping
ISIS fighters identify who was Yazidi and who wasn't.
Yazidi women held in ISIS prisons, waiting to be sold, quickly realized that
ISIS placed a higher value on unmarried girls, so many would say they were
married even if they weren't. They would even pretend their nephews, nieces
or young siblings were their children. This worked for a while, until local
Sunnis working as ISIS prison guards began informing on them.
Fearing and loathing Sunnis
In August, I visited a training camp in south Sinjar for the Yazidi Hashd al
Shaabi [5], or Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF). As I spoke to the recruits
about their ordeal, a group of young men crowded around me demanding to know
if I was Muslim or Christian. I could tell if I said Muslim the response
would be hostile. I told them my family is Druze.
"Druze? Is that Muslim?" they asked with puzzled expressions. The Druze are
a minority sect that live mostly in Lebanon, Syria and Israel-Palestine, so
it makes sense that Iraqis might not be familiar with them.
"No, Druze is not Muslim," I said. They told me I could stay.
Yazidi recruits in the barracks at the Yazidi PMF training camp in south
Sinjar. (Photo credit: Rania Khalek)
I reminded them that the PMF is majority Shia and headed by a Shia man and
that Shias are Muslim. "That's different," a recruit snapped. "The Sunnis
are the ones who persecuted us. The Shia in Hashd al Shaabi helped us. We
have no problems with the Shia."
Behdo, a scrawny 28-year-old Yazidi PMF recruit, interjected to explain why
he believes Sunnis aren't to be trusted. Behdo is from Gir Shebek, a tiny
collective town north of Sinjar mountain that was half Sunni and half
Yazidi. "We [Sunnis and Yazidis] were friends," he reminisced. "We even
celebrated Eid together. But then they turned on us."
Behdo's sister was kidnapped by his Sunni neighbor and classmate, a young
man he had grown up with. The former classmate phoned Behdo's family to brag
that he had kidnapped his sister. He taunted them about forcibly converting
her to Sunni Islam. Behdo's uncle eventually bought her back for $3,200.
"You can never trust a Sunni," Behdo warned.
'They turned into monsters'
In March, at a gathering at the Iraqi prime minister's office organized for
Yazidis in collaboration with a western mediation NGO, Jaafar al Husseini,
the head of Iraq's national reconciliation committee, introduced the
conference by stating that the suffering of Yazidis was greater than anybody
else's. He even compared it to the Jewish Holocaust. He also spoke of their
historic persecution and the Ottoman Mufti who issued a fatwa against
Yazidis.
The United Nations had similarly described ISIS's crimes against Yazidis as
an "ongoing genocide [10]."
The Yazidi community has been shattered. According to the directorate of
Yazidi affairs in Dohuk, 6,417 Yazidis were kidnapped by ISIS. Over 3,000
have been rescued or escaped, but hundreds remain unaccounted for even as
ISIS loses its major strongholds. Of the 500,000 Yazidis who were living in
Iraq, 360,000 were displaced by the ISIS attack and at least 90,000 left the
country. Thousands more, mostly men and adolescent boys, were systematically
killed, but the number varies depending on who you ask. It is believed that
some, especially those who were young children when captured, are being held
by ISIS supporters in refugee camps and likely don't even remember their
Yazidi identity.
As a poor and rural minority community, Yazidis have historically faced
extreme persecution, including several attempted genocides over the past
centuries. That's why they live in the mountains; Mount Sinjar has served as
a refuge time and again.
Sunni Islam has always been the dominant religion in the Middle East.
Historically it has been the religion of the state. People from minority
sects across the region have passed down collective memories of Sunni
Islam's persecution against them (though minorities have on many occasions,
particularly during civil wars, turned against one another as well). They
say this explains why Shias, Druze, Christians, Alawites and Yazidis are
concentrated in the mountains-they were escaping persecution from the
dominant state-backed sect in the region.
ISIS, they say, is just a new iteration of something that has always existed
and that comes back every century or two.
"Every 100 years, Sunnis can't help massacring us," one Yazidi elder told
me. "ISIS just carried out what the Ottomans did in the past. They kill us
for being Yazidi," he added.
In more recent history, Yazidis have been targeted with hate speech, forced
conversions, exclusion from the labor market, kidnappings and killings for
being Yazidi.
"Ten percent of the people who massacred the Yazidis were from outside,"
says Murad Sheikh Kalo, the leader of the Yazidi PMF. "The rest were our
Sunni neighbors."
"Saudi Arabia is the ideological foundation for ISIS," he continued,
expressing a commonly heard view among Yazidis that rarely breaks through
into the Western press. "But it is Turkey who trained them. And the
Israelis, Americans and British who armed them. Our Sunni neighbors were
their foot soldiers. And they turned into monsters overnight," he added.
Though it seemed to take place in an instant, the Yazidi genocide was
decades in the making, the unintended culmination of a series of policies
dating back more than 40 years.
Paving a path to genocide
The groundwork for the catastrophe that befell Iraq's Yazidis was laid in
1975, when Saddam Hussein initiated his campaign of Arabization. Yazidi
villages on Sinjar mountain were destroyed by the government and rebuilt in
the plains north and south of the mountain in what are called collective
towns. Many of the collective towns have a Yazidi name (Yazidis speak a
dialect of Kurdish) and an Arabic name that the Ba'athist government
imposed.
The collective towns were intentionally populated with and surrounded by
Arab Bedouin tribes "to control Yazidi areas," says Khider Domle, a Yazidi
journalist, activist and teacher at the University of Dohuk. "They brought
Arab tribes that hate Yazidis and call Yazidis devil worshippers from the
south of Iraq to try to change the demography of Sinjar," he continued.
"Step by step they took land from Yazidis and gave it to Arabs. Then they
made huge agricultural projects for the Arabs. They wouldn't allow Yazidi
laborers to work on those projects until 1995," he said.
That same year-1995-Saddam Hussein's government launched al-Hamlah
al-Imaniyah, or the Return to Faith Campaign in an effort to strengthen his
rule at a time of weakness. With UN enforced sanctions and various uprisings
from the Kurds and Shias threatening his legitimacy, Saddam opened up space
for tribalism while encouraging the Islamization of society through the
Faith Campaign. This coincided with a growing trend toward conservative
Islam that was sweeping the region. In Iraq, this trend was heightened by
the sanctions, which had hollowed out the middle class and diminished the
quality of education. The Faith Campaign was anti-Salafi but had the
unintended consequence of Islamizing the Baath party, which meant that the
sons of the top officials were also Islamized, creating fertile ground for
jihadi influence a decade later when the Americans invaded, something Saddam
and his Baath party did not foresee.
Yazidis were always an underclass in Iraq, often excluded from the labor
market. In a more Islamic society they were even more vulnerable. Yazidis
owned and operated many of the liquor stores, nightclubs and bars in Iraq's
cities. The Faith Campaign shut down much of Iraq's nightlife, further
reducing economic opportunities for Yazidis. At the same time, Yazidis were
demonized for being non-Muslims. And due to the Arabization scheme, they
were surrounded by people who were being primed to view Yazidis as inferior
and subhuman.
"In Sinjar [the Faith Campaign] was a conversion campaign," says Domle. "The
regime brought mullahs to educate people (Arab Sunnis) on how much they
should hate Yazidis. They paid them to do this. When al Qaeda came, many of
those people (Arab Sunnis) joined Al Qaeda. And when ISIS came the
environment was there for them to join."
The 2003 US invasion of Iraq created even more precarious conditions for
Yazidis.
Many Yazidis worked as translators and drivers for the Americans, hoping to
elevate their economic status in a new and democratic Iraq that promised
freedom from Saddam's discriminatory policies. Instead, the US collapsed the
Iraqi state, opening the floodgates to al Qaeda. The country descended into
sectarian civil war.
Yazidis in Nineveh Governorate, like their Christian counterparts, became
targets of the al Qaeda dominated Sunni insurgency. As early as 2004,
militants were distributing flyers in Mosul promising "divine rewards [11]
for those who kill Yazidis." But anti-Yazidi attacks received almost no
attention in the international press. As a poor community with no political
power, international advocacy organization or lobbying apparatus, the plight
of the Yazidis went largely unnoticed, despite ominous warnings.
The 2014 assault was as much a conversion campaign as an enslavement
campaign. ISIS went to extreme lengths to erase Yazidi identity and supplant
it with a strict Sunni one when possible. At an ISIS prison for Yazidi women
and girls in the collective town of Tal Ezeir (its Arabic name is
Qahtaniyah) located south of Sinjar, Yazidis were forced to pray in the
direction of Mecca, as instructed by the Qibla [4] inscribed on the walls of
each cell. Yazidi boys over the age of seven were taken to ISIS
indoctrination camps and forced to become fighters for the group. Some of
those who have been rescued have been so thoroughly brainwashed they have
reportedly tried to kill members of their family for being Yazidi.
The tribes that joined ISIS
The Matewti, Khatouni and Jahaysh tribes are the dominant Arab Sunni tribes
in and around Sinjar. Many of them joined ISIS. Yazidis say members of the
Khatouni tribe were the most hostile, with many of the Khatouni tribal
leaders becoming ISIS commanders. At an ISIS prison for Yazidi sex slaves
located in Tal Ezeir, endless piles of girls and women's clothing and shoes
were scattered across the floor, draped over mattresses and strewn on the
steps leading upstairs where I found a wall adorned with ISIS graffiti.
Below it someone had signed his name, Mohammed Khatouni.
But not all the local Arab tribes are remembered in a bad light. Yazidis
speak fondly of the Shammar, a large Arab Sunni tribe whose members
generally helped Yazidis. When Yazidi families came down from the mountain
to Syria through a corridor opened by the YPG, the Syrian branch of the PKK,
members of the Shammar tribe provided them with food, water and directions
to Kurdistan as well as tips for ISIS-controlled roads to avoid. "They
worked as a very helpful GPS," said a Yazidi man whose family was saved by
the Shammar tribe in Syria. "They also provided cars and fuel. Only the
Shammar were good Sunni neighbors," he observed.
While there are members of the Shammar tribe who joined ISIS, the tribal
leadership generally opposed the militant group and went on to make up a
large portion of Arab Sunni tribes fighting ISIS in Iraq and Syria.
Calm before the storm
Despite the hateful climate fostered by decades of discriminatory policies,
dehumanization and power vacuums, most Yazidis say that before August 2014
they had few if any problems with their Sunni neighbors. They would eat
together, celebrate holidays together, their kids played together, and they
attended each other's weddings. Yazidis even had a word for Arabs who were
like family: kreef. They only had problems with Arab Sunnis from Baaj, a
district in northwest Iraq just south of Sinjar.
Baaj was a strategic hideout [12] for ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi
before it was liberated in June by the PMF. Today Iraqi and PMF flags fly
side by side atop Baaj's deserted houses, many of them broken from the
fighting. All of the doors and windows are missing. A few homes appear to
have been smashed by airstrikes while others are partially damaged from
booby traps set by ISIS. The houses in Baaj are quite large and
multi-storied compared to the one-story homes in Yazidi villages. It was
also home to many wealthy traffickers and smugglers and has long served as a
key passageway for Jihadists between Iraq and Syria.
ISIS graffiti on the wall outside a school in Baaj. (Photo credit: Rania
Khalek)
Prior to 2014, Baaj was an Al Qaeda stronghold. At least once or twice a
month a Yazidi youth traveling through Baaj would get kidnapped and ransomed
for around $15,000. In 2007 Sunni militants believed to be members of Al
Qaeda from Baaj detonated five truck bombs that tore through the Yazidi
towns of Siba Sheikh Khider (known in Arabic as al Jazeera) and Tel Ezeir,
killing [13] upwards of 500 people and wounding some 1,500. It was the
largest death toll from a single attack since the start of the US invasion.
That same year, Sunni gunmen stopped a bus of laborers in Mosul and executed
the 23 Yazidis workers on board. Yazidis living in proximity to the attacks
began to leave Nineveh as a result of the rising threats against them.
Recruiting local Sunnis
ISIS took Mosul in early June of 2014. Tal Afar fell a few days later. This
is when the militarization of the Sinjar-adjacent districts of Baaj and
Balij began.
Baaj was once home to some 50,000 residents, most of whom belonged to the
Khatouni and Matewti Bedouin tribes. Many of the leaders of these tribes
pledged their loyalty to ISIS and participated in the atrocities carried out
against their Yazidi neighbors in Sinjar.
According to Yazidis as well as investigators at an international NGO that
is building a case against ISIS, but who asked not to be named in this
report due to the sensitive nature of their work, the loyalty of these
tribes was secured prior to the August 3 genocide in a series of meeting
with ISIS figures in and around Baaj.
Qasem Shevan, a brigade leader in the Yazidi PMF who commanded an
independent Yazidi militia against ISIS following the genocide, told me he
witnessed one of these meetings taking place in Qabusiya village on July 27,
2014, between ISIS leaders and Sunni tribal leaders named Ahmad Jarbouaa and
Mohammad Qasem Bejuoh. "These men were in another meeting with the same
people on the next day in Baaj," said Shevan. "I didn't see the meeting in
Baaj, I only heard about it. But I saw the one in Qabusiya with my own
eyes."
These meetings suggest that at least some of the members of the Baaj tribes
were going to be loyal to ISIS when the Sinjar operation was launched.
Yazidis believe that those who hosted ISIS gathered intelligence for them on
Yazidis. However it remains unclear whether the locals were fully aware of
ISIS's plans for the Yazidis.
Enthusiasm for ISIS
After the spread of ISIS to Mosul, Tal Afar and Baaj, Yazidis noticed a
change in the behavior of their Sunni neighbors in Sinjar. Some raised ISIS
flags outside their homes. Others began referring to Yazidis as kufar
(unbelievers). There was widespread Sunni excitement for ISIS in the
villages surrounding Sinjar, but this did not immediately translate into
violence against Yazidis.
Sukr, 25, grew up in Mosul. He and his family fled the city in 2008 after
Sunni insurgents sent leaflets to Yazidi homes with notes threatening
violence if they didn't leave. Today Sukr and his family live in Sharya, a
Yazidi neighborhood in Dohuk. Sukr kept in touch with his Sunni friends in
Mosul and called to check on them after ISIS took over in June 2014. He was
surprised to hear them celebrate the arrival of the militant group. "They
wanted the Islamic State at first. They only changed their minds after ISIS
was mean to them," said Sukr.
Jameel Chomar is manager of operations at Yazda, a Yazidi NGO based in
Dohuk. Prior to the genocide he was a schoolteacher in Borek, a collective
town in north Sinjar. He described a similar response from his Sunni
colleagues after ISIS captured nearby areas.
"I spoke to some of the teachers in the collective towns. Some were happy
about ISIS," said Chomar. "They said this is the first time after Saddam's
regime collapsed that we could enter Mosul without checkpoints. They were
saying ISIS is cleaning the area of barriers, security is very stable, there
are no IEDs, no suicide bombs, no mines. They told me, we are happy. I told
them we hope that they [ISIS] will do something good, but I think they will
apply sharia law, and it will be very aggressive."
Around the same time Yazidis began to hear threats against their community.
Members of the Khatouni and Matewti tribes reportedly threatened to attack
them during Xile, a Yazidi holiday celebrated on August 2. There was also a
large degree of whitewashing of ISIS by their neighbors, mostly from members
of the Matewti tribe. One Yazidi after another relayed a similar story about
how their Sunni neighbors encouraged them to stay put, offering assurances
that they would protect them from ISIS. Some of these assurances were
probably genuine. But there was also a great deal of intentional deception
to lure Yazidis into staying without putting up a fight.
As the perceived threat grew, Yazidis took a more defensive stance alongside
the Peshmerga, the US-backed Kurdish militia of the Kurdistan Regional
Government (KRG) that was in charge of security in Sinjar. As ISIS flags and
vehicles started popping up, Yazidis knew something was coming but the
majority of them believed the Peshmerga would be strong enough to fight off
an ISIS advance.
Anger at the Kurds for exploiting the rise of ISIS
Back in 2014, Masoud Barzani, president of the Kurdistan Regional
Government, assured Yazidis that the Peshmerga would protect them from ISIS.
But as ISIS attacked Sinjar, the Peshmerga systematically retreated without
warning, leaving the Yazidis completely defenseless. Some even told Yazidis
that they were only leaving to bring back reinforcements, which they never
did. Barzani has yet to offer a sufficient explanation for why his troops
were ordered to pull out of Sinjar.
The Peshmerga retreat was disastrous for the Yazidis, especially those
living southwest of the mountain; their towns were the first to be swarmed
by ISIS fighters from Baaj.
Most Yazidis suspect that Barzani's Peshmerga made a deal with ISIS to get
rid of the Yazidis for the sake of expanding Kurdistan. Sinjar is
technically part of Iraq's Nineveh Governorate. It is also one of 26
"disputed territories" across northern Iraq that the Kurds claim belongs to
them.
According to an analysis [14] by Jane's Intelligence Review, "After the
Iraqi military's retreat from the Islamic State in 2014, Kurds seized
approximately 90% of these territories, including Kirkuk." In other words,
the KRG exploited the rise of ISIS and the chaos it stoked as an opportunity
to carry out a massive land grab, nearly doubling [15] its territory.
Meanwhile Iraqi Kurdistan has destroyed tens of Arab Sunni villages since
2014 usually under the guise of liberating and protecting areas from ISIS.
In 2017 alone, the Peshmerga and KRG intelligence displaced or prevented the
return of Arab Sunnis in at least 21 villages in Nineveh Governorate. It's
the only part of the Middle East outside of Israel/Palestine where
deliberate government-backed ethnic cleansing of Arab Sunnis is taking
place, yet it has received no attention.
Yazidis also accuse the KRG of providing sanctuary to people who
collaborated with ISIS, particularly if they were Kurdish.
"Kurdish Sunnis who joined ISIS are getting protection from Kurdistan," said
Sayeed Qudr Maamko, a 44-year-old farmer from the outskirts of Qabusi, a
mixed Yazidi and Kurdish Sunni village in south Sinjar. A stereotypical
military man with a crew cut, bushy mustache and raspy voice, Sayeed joined
the PMF over the summer after the PMF liberated south Sinjar from ISIS.
"Barzani might as well start an embassy for ISIS," he quipped.
Kurdish ISIS
While the Erbil-based peshmerga are widely believed to have abandoned
Yazidis to their fate, and to have opportunistically seized large swaths of
Arab Sunni areas in a land grab, once ISIS began moving towards Erbil, the
Kurds fought ISIS as fiercely as other Iraqi security forces. The peshmerga
ultimately played a major role in the fight against ISIS and sacrificed
thousands of fighters combating the militant group. In fact, ISIS and Al
Qaeda have traditionally resented Kurds because of their alliance with the
US and Israel, and because of the predominance of secular Kurdish parties.
In Syria, Kurds have been targeted by ISIS and Nusra en masse and even the
supposedly "moderate" Sunni insurgents have used genocidal language against
them.
According to the Yazidis, however, it wasn't just Arab Sunnis that
collaborated with ISIS. Their Kurdish Sunni neighbors also played a part.
On top of the extreme repression [3] they face as non-Kurds, the Yazidi and
Christian minorities in Iraqi Kurdistan described mounting pressure from
rising religious conservatism and Sunni sectarianism among the Kurdish
population. "If it wasn't for Kurdish nationalism, maybe Iraqi Kurdistan
would have joined with ISIS because they are Sunni brothers," one Yazidi
activist speculated.
As Saad Babir from Yazda recently observed [16], religious extremism in
Iraqi Kurdistan "has expanded significantly in the past ten years,
paralleling the general increase in religiosity. The number of mosques in
the region now exceeds the total number of schools, universities, and
hospitals combined. Concerns that religious extremism could increase in the
future causes alarm for non-Muslim groups. Studies have shown that around
one thousand Kurdish youth joined IS, suggesting that Kurdish societies have
serious issues with radicalism that must be addressed."
Indeed, sectarian attitudes appear to be just as pervasive in Iraqi
Kurdistan as in the rest of Iraq. On the way to Dohuk from Erbil, my Kurdish
driver, Ali, expressed fear of and hatred for Shias, who he complained were
killing Sunnis on behalf of Iran. He went on to describe Yazidis as a weird
and insular community and accused them of hating Sunni Muslims. These were
not uncommon views in Erbil and may have led at least some Kurds to join
ISIS.
As soon as word spread that ISIS was on its way from Baaj, Yazidi men in the
frontline collective towns of Gir Zerek (Arabic name: Adnaniyah) and Siba
Sheikh Khider (Arabic name: Al Jazeera), who had already organized their
weapons in anticipation of a possible attack, dug into their trenches and
prepared for a fight.
Gir Zerek was home to some 15,000 people, according to Yazidi locals. Three
to four thousand were Kurdish Sunnis and the rest were Yazidi.
"Our Kurdish Sunni neighbors were calling us Kufar after ISIS took Mosul.
And they started shooting at us when ISIS attacked Sinjar," said Marwan
Kamala El Sheikh, a Yazidi PMF soldier from Gir Zerek who helped in the
resistance effort against ISIS. Of course it's never quite so black and
white.
The armed Yazidi men of Gir Zerek held off ISIS for several hours until they
ran out of ammunition and were captured and executed by ISIS. Their
sacrifice allowed time for hundreds of thousands of Yazidis from all over
Sinjar to escape to the mountain and for that they are memorialized as
heroes. They were assisted by a small group of about seven or eight local
Kurdish Sunnis from the Asayish who stayed behind to block the ISIS advance.
I was told they hailed from the Sarhoki tribe.
The ISIS attack on Sinjar also demonstrated that Iraqi Kurds were influenced
by the same sectarian and tribal dynamics that prevailed among Iraqi Arabs.
Kanroveh is a Kurdish village that is half Shia and half Sunni. The Kurdish
Shias from Kanroveh escaped with the Yazidis to Sinjar mountain when ISIS
attacked. The Shia homes were burned to the ground or booby trapped. The
Sunni houses remained intact. Locals told me that the top leader for ISIS in
Kanroveh was a man called Najem Abdullah Ensuad, a shipper and farmer from
the Kurdish Babawat tribe, a mixed Shia and Sunni tribe. Najem was from the
Sunni Babawat.
"The Kurds are supporting the Sunnis because they are Sunni," argued a
Yazidi elder. "So when ISIS rose up, the Kurds started coordinating with
ISIS. This thinking is from Salafism, from Saudi Arabia." He added that most
of the Kurds used to be Yazidis until they were forcibly converted to Sunni
Islam by the Ottomans.
It is widely believed that Yazidis were the original religion in northern
Iraq, but this has been forgotten after centuries of forced conversion to
Sunni Islam. Even some Kurds will admit that their ancestors were Yazidi.
"For the Kurds, who knows? Maybe their grandfathers or fathers were Yazidis
and now they want other Yazidis to become Muslim, just like them," he
reasoned.
Campaign of deception
The Yazidis tend to place the bulk of the blame for their suffering on the
Kurdish Peshmerga. Next, they blame their neighbors' duplicity.
Yazidis who survived the genocidal onslaught from a variety of locations
offered similar stories of their Sunni neighbors offering false assurances
and encouraging them to submit to ISIS. There appeared to be a widespread
campaign of intentional deception.
"When ISIS started attacking the collective towns with mortars, the Arab and
Kurdish Sunnis in these areas were on Facebook sending messages to Yazidis,
saying don't be afraid, ISIS is only coming to liberate the area from the
government," recalled Sayeed Qudr Maamko.
"The Sunnis in these areas said to us, we have a relationship with you, we
were born together, we live in peace, and as Sunnis we will defend you even
from ISIS. So most of the Yazidis were raising the white flag of surrender
without fighting with ISIS because our Sunni neighbors told us not to
resist. Then after ISIS came, our Sunni neighbors began imprisoning and
killing the men and selling the women as sex slaves. They were sleeper cells
for ISIS. When ISIS came, our Sunni neighbors became ISIS members. And when
ISIS escaped, some of our former neighbors escaped to Kurdistan," Maamko
said.
Seeham Haji Khudayda is 22 years old. With brown hair, wide-set eyes and a
resilient sense of humor, it's hard to believe she underwent the horrors
ISIS subjected her to. Even though she's illiterate and can't speak Arabic,
she managed to escape her ISIS captors thanks in large measure to her clever
wit. Seeham is from a village in north Sinjar called Hardan. She was newly
married and a new mother. Her daughter was just three months old when ISIS
enslaved her.
"We woke up early at 7am on August 3, 2014 and heard ISIS was in Tel Ezeir
and Gir Zirek. So we started fleeing, but we didn't know that they were
taking the women," she recounted.
"Our village is surrounded by Arab villages, they were our kreef [friendly
neighbors]. Each family in the village have some friends or kreef in those
villages. They came to our village and said we will protect you, don't
leave, don't worry, just raise white flags and nothing will happen, only
those who are fighting against ISIS will be harmed. Don't fight. They also
told us the road to Kurdistan is closed, which was a lie. But we believed
them. We thought we had no place to go. We were so confused about what to
do. And then it was noon."
At noon a group of ISIS vehicles from the surrounding Arab Sunni villages
entered Hardan. "There were no strangers among those ISIS members. We knew
all of them, they were our friends and neighbors. They said stay in your
homes and do not let the girls and women go outside. They were talking to
the men in Hardan normally, because they knew them," said Seeham.
Arab Sunni leaders from the surrounding villages of Gir Shebek, Naeneeyat
and Golat told Yazidis in Hardan not to flee, assuring them ISIS would not
hurt them.
"We stayed in our homes until 5pm," she continued. "We were on the phone
calling people from other villages, we didn't know they are taking the girls
and women as sex slaves. All the Arab Sunni friends we were talking with
were saying that ISIS is just killing those who pick up arms against them,
but they don't take the women and children. But after 5pm, we talked to some
Yazidis saying the opposite-that they are taking the women from the south
and the children and killing the men, so don't believe the Arabs telling you
that nothing will happen to you."
Hardan's Mukhtar also received a visit from members of the local Shammar
tribe, considered the friendliest among local Sunnis. "They are killing the
Yazidi men and taking the women, do not believe them," the Shammar leaders
warned.
"At this point all the people in the village started to flee. My family and
I fled in the car with our neighbors. We reached the entrance of the village
and saw ISIS set up a checkpoint."
ISIS fighters captured Seeham and her family and began separating the men
from women. Segregating the men from the women and children would become a
pattern across Sinjar, a testament to the pre-planned nature of what was
about to befall the Yazidis.
"There was about 17 men with us. The women and children stayed in the cars
and they took the men," said Seeham. They were held at the checkpoint for
some 30 minutes while the ISIS members "arranged the men to kill them,"
including Seeham's husband. That was the last time she saw him.
"We knew they were going to kill them, they arranged them in lines. My
husband's uncle, Khalat, came and told us they will kill us and take you as
sex slaves, he heard an ISIS member say this." ISIS drove off with the women
and girls, but not before Seeham got a glimpse of the men forced onto their
knees by ISIS gunman. "We weren't sure if they killed those men or not, but
we are told they killed them and now there is a mass grave there."
Not a single man in Hardan survived. It is believed this is because, unlike
in Kojo, the men of Hardan were beheaded.
The women were taken to a school in Tal Afar. "We thought we were the only
ones ISIS captured but we found there were thousands of Yazidi women and
girls captured in that school."
This was the beginning of what would be a year-and-a-half-long nightmare for
Seeham, who was shuffled from one dirty, overcrowded prison to the next and
sold at least seven times to ISIS fighters.
Misguided trust
The duplicity of their neighbors was the most deadly in the tiny Yazidi
farming village of Kojo, the site of the largest ISIS massacre of Yazidis.
On Aug. 15, 2017, ISIS rounded up and murdered every single man and teenage
boy in Kojo, including Kojo's mukhtar, Ahmad Jaso, after the town's
residents refused to convert to Sunni Islam. The older women were executed
as well, though it's unclear where they were buried. All of the younger
women and girls were sold into sexual slavery.
An estimated 400 bodies are buried in several mass graves that dot the
outskirts of Kojo. The graves are fenced off and have yet to be unearthed.
Local Yazidi PMF are trying their best to preserve the crime scene as they
wait for international investigators to visit. There are some human bones
strewn on the ground, likely dug up by roaming dogs.
One of several mass graves on the outskirts of Kojo. (Photo credit: Rania
Khalek)
Ninety percent of the people who carried out the assault on Sinjar were
locals, says Naif Jaso, the brother of Kojo's mukhtar. Naif says Kojo was so
close with its Arab neighbors that there were more Arab Sunnis than Yazidis
at his son Talal's wedding, including some of those who would go on to join
ISIS.
Naif happened to be out of the country when ISIS invaded, but he kept in
touch with his brother hourly until the massacre. His daughters and
granddaughters were sold into sexual slavery and three of his sons and most
of his grandsons were killed. His 12-year-old grandson Manay, one of the few
survivors, was hidden by his mother before the slaughter took place and was
then smuggled out by local Sunnis from the Shammar tribe. Manay's
15-year-old brother was likely killed and the fate of his 5-year-old brother
is unknown. The family believes Manay's mother was killed in an airstrike,
but they don't have the heart to tell him.
The ISIS assault on Sinjar initially bypassed Kojo and a nearby Yazidi
village called Hatimiyah. But due to their more remote location, the
residents of Kojo and Hatimiyah were unable to flee the area. Those who
tried to flee were either killed or captured by ISIS.
The population of the entire town of Kojo was 1,738 men, women and children.
At least 500 were either not present in the village, working in other areas
or escaped in the morning prior to ISIS surrounding the town. Those who
remained were either killed or enslaved.
On August 3, the day ISIS invaded Sinjar, an estimated 73 women and 13
children who fled Kojo in the morning following ISIS's attacks on Gir Zerek
and Siba Sheikh Khider were killed in and around Solagh, just to the east of
Sinjar. International investigators believe that ISIS killed the older women
because they were seen as having no economic value.
ISIS fighters were hunting Yazidis on the road to the mountain. Yazidis who
tried to flee identified one of the ISIS hunters as a local Arab Sunni
leader named Sheikh Jarallah Mohammad Ali Jarallah, a man Naif knew well.
"He was at my son's wedding in 2013," said Naif. "I called him and asked,
where are you? He told me I'm on the road between Tal Qasab and Sinjar. I
knew then he was hunting the families that were trying to escape, because
that is where many of them were telling me they saw him. I asked him what
happened with ISIS, what are they doing with the families. He told me I'm
here to prevent the members of the Matewti tribe from stealing the money of
Yazidis. But the families were telling us this man was armed and standing at
a checkpoint with ISIS members helping them hunt Yazidis. He was lying."
At around 4 and 5 in the evening on August 3, an ISIS commander named Abu
Hamzeh al Khatouni from Baaj came to al-Hatimiyah and Kojo to speak to the
village mukhtars. The mukhtars of Hatimiyah and Kojo met on several
occasions with one another as well as with local Arab sheikhs to try to come
to an agreement about what would happen to their villages under ISIS. After
several meetings Abu Hamzeh gave the people of Hatimiyah and Kojo an
ultimatum: Convert to Islam and you can stay and live under the Islamic
State or give ISIS all your gold and other valuables and we will let you
flee to the mountain. A similar ultimatum was given to the Christians of
Mosul. Christians who chose not to convert were allowed to leave because
ISIS considers them "people of the book." Yazidis assumed ISIS would allow
them to do the same.
As the villages contemplated the ultimatum, ISIS wrote orders at the village
entrances not to harm the residents. There was an agreement that these
people were under an ultimatum.
By August 7, Abu Hamzeh had issued the official ultimatum, giving Yazidis in
Kojo and Hatimiyah three to four days to decide whether to convert. However,
there was no mention of what would happen if they chose not to convert,
which left Yazidis feeling uneasy. This prompted Ahmad Jaso, the Mukhtar of
Kojo, to travel to Hatimiyah to speak with Hatimiyah's Mokhtar, Hussein
Barjas. Jaso and his entourage spent the night in Hatimiyah with Barjas
strategizing their next move. They decided both villages would escape to
Sinjar mountain before the ultimatum deadline. They planned their escape for
either August 9 or 10. The residents of Hatimiyah broke into two groups.
They covered the headlights of all their cars and vehicles with wet sand to
conceal their movement and in the dead of night they made it safely to the
mountain.
But the residents of Kojo did not escape. At the last minute Ahmad Jaso
backed out.
Following a number of phone calls between Arab Sunni leaders and more visits
from Abu Hamzeh, Jaso was reassured that there would be no problems under
the Islamic state. There was a general feeling that the Yazidis would be
allowed to live. Then Abu Hamzeh went to Hatimiyah and found it deserted
aside from a few elderly people who couldn't make the journey. He was
furious. He brought the elderly people of Hatimiyah to Kojo and accused Jaso
of betraying him. ISIS then cordoned off Kojo, surrounding it with
checkpoints and ISIS vehicles. Heavily armed ISIS fighters entered the
village, took over the school and turned it into their headquarters.
"The people of Kojo had misguided trust in their neighbors," the
international NGO investigator told me. "They were the victims of a huge
deception."
The ultimatum: convert or die
By August 12, Kojo was surrounded. Its residents lost their chance to
escape.
Naif tried desperately to find a solution that would save the people of
Kojo. He teamed up with his brother, trying to convince their Arab Sunni
friends to help.
"I called Sheikhs from the Khatouni's, including Kassem al Hamzeh and Malek
al Nouri Jarallah--he's our neighbor from the western side of Kojo. At the
same time my brother was contacting the others. They claimed to meet with
the caliphate leaders in Mosul to persuade them to protect the Yazidis. I
don't know if they really went or not. I contacted Salem Mullah Aloo, he's a
big head for the sheikhs inside Mosul and he has a daughter married to the
relative of Mosul's caliphate leader. I contacted him and said come on
Salem, all of the families inside Kojo are going to die. He said, what
should I do, they didn't listen to my words. ISIS is like gang leaders, they
don't listen to me. They are idiots, fools, hoodlums, jerks."
On August 15 around lunch time a large ISIS convoy entered and surrounded
Kojo. Part of that convoy included two excavators driven by local members of
the Matewti tribe, according to survivors. One of the drivers was very well
known to some of the survivors of the Kojo massacre as a former
coworker-they worked construction together. Survivors recall hearing the
excavators moving earth on the outskirts of the village. They were digging
the mass graves.
ISIS told all the men, women and children of the village to gather in the
school and hand over all their money and gold. By noon the entire village
had congregated at school. The men were separated from the women, car keys
and mobile phones were confiscated and valuable possessions were collected
in bags.
The school in Kojo where ISIS gathered the village for enslavement and
execution. (Photo credit: Rania Khalek)
Various discussions took place between Abu Hamzeh and Ahmad Jaso but there
were other ISIS commanders from other places present, senior leaders from
Tal Afar. According to survivors, the men were told that they if they chose
not to convert, they had to give up all their possessions and would be
released like the Christians of Mosul. They were given several opportunities
to convert. Ahmad Jaso reportedly said, we'd rather go to mountain, we want
to stay within our faith. ISIS started loading the men into vehicles, around
40 to 60 men at a time. They were driven to various points on outskirts of
village and shot.
Seventeen Yazidi men survived the ISIS massacre, mostly by playing dead and
hiding under bodies. The survivors say they recognized some of the
perpetrators as members of the Matewti and Khatouni tribes. Though many of
the executioners wore masks, the survivors were able to identify one of the
ISIS men operating one of the excavators that dug the massive graves. They
knew him from working construction together. He was their coworker.
Dalal Ahmad Jassem, 46, is one of Ahmad Jaso's daughters. She was kidnapped
by ISIS after they killed all of the men in Kojo, including her husband. She
spent a year and a half being shuffled from one prison to another.
Eventually she was sold into slavery and repeatedly raped by ISIS fighters.
Wearing all black with a scarf wrapped loosely around her head, Dalal spoke
to me at her apartment in Dohuk. She seemed emotionally numb, though every
10 minutes or so she would break out in tears, quickly collect herself and
then continue.
"We had a very peaceful and friendly life together before ISIS," she said of
Kojo and the surrounding Arab Sunni villages. "After ISIS attacked Sinjar,
the leaders of the Arab Sunni villages surrounding our village became ISIS
leaders," explained Dalal. "They were coming to our house, meeting with my
father and saying we'll try to find a way to help you. They said they were
coming as friends and saying we will talk to our leaders in ISIS to find a
way to help you. They had captured and besieged our village but they kept
coming to my father saying we will find a way to help you."
"They all kept telling my father that nothing would happen, and in the end
they betrayed my father. They were saying these things just to get my father
to trust them," she said.
"On August 14, they had a meeting inside my brothers house. He made lunch
for them, they were eating sheep and rice because they were the sheikhs of
the Sunnis. After 13 hours, the next day, they witnessed the murders in
Kojo. They witnessed my brother's killing, they were having lunch with him
the day before. They were watching and did nothing," said Ahmad Jaso. "There
are no Sunnis who didn't help ISIS. Even the Sunni politicians in Iraq
supported the protesters that became ISIS."
Among the Sunnis of Sinjar,denialand defensiveness
Yazidis insist at least 90 percent of their Sunni neighbors joined ISIS. The
number seemed to be heavily exaggerated. I traversed Iraq to track down
displaced Sunnis from Sinjar and get their side of the story.
Tal al Jarabeaa is a displaced persons camp on the desert outskirts of
Mosul. It was established on December 12, 2016 and shelters around 1,900
families who fled ISIS-controlled areas, including Arab Sunni families from
Sinjar. Rows of tents house impoverished families. There are flies
everywhere. Camels lounge under the baking desert sun. Children run around
barefoot, playing with pieces of trash and empty water bottles.
An Iraqi child wanders around Tal al Jarabeaa, an IDP camp on the outskirts
of Mosul. (Photo credit: Rania Khalek)
Iraqi children pose for a photo at Tal al Jarabeaa. (Photo credit: Rania
Khalek)
Most of people I spoke to expressed loathing for ISIS, but showed little
sympathy for the genocide of the Yazidis. Most even accused the Yazidis of
orchestrating the genocide against themselves, casting Yazidis as aggressors
against Arab Sunnis.
"The Yazidis are targeting the Sunnis and Arabs," argued Salah Ahmad Jassem,
42, a displaced Arab Sunni from Gir Shebek. Gir Shebek was a mixed Sunni and
Yazidi collective town close to the remote Yazidi farming village of Hardan.
Most of the men in Hardan were massacred and women enslaved by ISIS.
"The Yazidis want to destroy the reputation of Sunnis and Arabs by saying
that ISIS members are Sunni. But there are Yazidis who became ISIS members,"
Jassem said defensively. "Half of the Yazidis became ISIS members and
started hunting and selling their own people. And Sunnis around Sinjar
helped them escape," he argued, accusing Yazidis of being ungrateful for the
help and protection they received from Sunnis
"For 50 years we [Sunnis and Yazidis] were neighbors and we had no
problems," he said. His voice grew louder, filling with anger, "But Yazidis
are now pushing from different sides against the Sunnis. We suffered from
ISIS more than the Yazidis suffered!" A crowd had formed around him and was
nodding in agreement.
"ISIS controlled our village for three months. When they took over, they
searched inside the village for Yazidis. We saved some Yazidis in the
village and let them escape toward Sinjar," said Jassem. "ISIS members
called us traitors for helping the Yazidis and prohibited us from leaving
our houses. They stole our money and weapons and imprisoned those who were
working with the police and government."
If Yazidis exaggerated the number of Sunnis who joined ISIS, their Sunni
neighbors downplayed it. Most of the local ISIS members were from Tal Afar
and Baaj, insisted 40-year-old Mohammed Ahmad, a member of the Jahaysh tribe
from Sinjar. "Gir Shebek, Nayniyah, Golat, Ayesshet - these villages are
around 12 kilometers all together. Inside the four villages, there is only
one person that joined ISIS," he said.
"When ISIS started occupying these territories, they finished off the Iraqi
army and then started talking about the Kurds and Yazidis. At first we
thought they were for peace with the Yazidis. Then they started talking
about killing them. We saw the mass graves inside. We saw them segregating
women and men, killing the men and taking women. We saw the women in the
cars screaming for help. We weren't present, but the road to Tal afar passes
by our village. We saw women in the cars going to Tal Afar. They were
terrified, banging on the windows and screaming for help," he added,
emphasizing that Arab Sunnis were punished for helping Yazidis.
"There's two people from our village who were killed by ISIS just because
they helped the Yazidis escape. These people who were executed by ISIS were
helping Yazidis escape from Tal afar and they were delivering them to mount
Sinjar," he said.
The only thing that Yazidis and Arab Sunnis seem to be in agreement about is
their hatred for the Peshmerga.
Ahmad complained that he tried to flee from ISIS with his family to
Kurdistan but the Peshmerga would not allowing Arab Sunnis to enter. "They
accuse us of being ISIS," he said. He also said the Peshmerga burned their
homes and kicked them out some three months after liberating his village in
northern Sinjar from ISIS. "We told Peshmerga, if you see any ISIS members,
just kill them. The Peshmerga burned our villages. They said the Yazidis did
it but it was the Peshmerga," he said.
Abdulkareem Ali Hamad is from a village around Sinjar called Abusenaam, an
entirely Sunni village about 25 kilometers away from Tal Qasab. He also
blamed the Peshmerga for displacing him from his village and accused Iraqi
Kurdistan of supporting ISIS.
"Inside my area, most ISIS members were from Tel Afar, the Matewti tribe and
Balij. The highest ranking ISIS leader in my town was from Tel Afar. I never
saw such a thing like ISIS behavior, like killing and hunting -- not in
movies, not in cartoons. I have two brothers who were in ISIS prisons for
more than a year because they were Iraqi police officers. And until now the
Kurds are helping ISIS members," he argued.
Burning for vengeance
In 2015 there were several media headlines that Yazidi militias were
attacking and murdering Sunni Arab civilians. Amnesty International soon
issued a report [17] echoing the accusations.
Yazidis of different political leanings vehemently denied that they were
responsible. They all blamed the Peshmerga and insisted that Yazidis were
falsely blamed by Gulf-funded media outlets. "Sunnis have excellent media,
like Al Jazeera," observed Jameel Chomar. "There was a village belonging to
Arabs in Zamar that was burned by the Peshmerga. Al Jazeera made a report
saying that Yazidis burned it. There were no Yazidis around there," he
insisted.
Even Arab Sunnis from Sinjar expressed confusion over the culprits. Among
those I spoke to, some blamed the Peshmerga, recalling that the US-backed
Kurdish militia burned their homes and forced them to leave their villages.
Others blamed Yazidis. But no one actually saw or knew who was behind it.
That's not to say Yazidis aren't capable of committing atrocities.
"I wish it was Yazidis who killed those Sunnis," a Yazidi activist in Dohuk
bluntly proclaimed. "We're not organized or armed enough to carry out
revenge like that. But I wish we could."
Rania Khalek is an independent journalist living in the Washington D.C.
area.
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Source URL:
https://www.alternet.org/grayzone-project/genocide-iraq-when-local-sunni-bec
ame-isis-and-slaughtered-their-neighbors
Links:
[1] https://www.alternet.org/authors/rania-khalek
[2] http://alternet.org
[3]
https://www.alternet.org/grayzone-project/field-yazidi-fighters-tales-genoci
de-isiss-hands-and-more-conflict-come
[4]
https://www.alternet.org/how-isis-wives-helped-their-husbands-rape-yazidi-se
x-slaves
[5]
http://www.alternet.org/grayzone-project/field-yazidi-fighters-tales-genocid
e-isiss-hands-and-more-conflict-come
[6]
http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2017/10/05/to-win-in-syria-need-to-fight-both
-isis-and-assad.html
[7]
http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/world/2016/11/23/isis-a-catastrophe-for-sun
nis/
[8] http://edition.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/europe/11/25/sbm.perpetrators/
[9] http://somewereneighbors.ushmm.org/
[10] https://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=57304#.WaLYNpMjHoy
[11]
https://www.mei.edu/content/social-change-amidst-terror-and-discrimination-y
ezidis-new-iraq
[12]
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jun/04/iraqi-forces-retake-key-town-o
f-baaj-from-isis
[13]
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/22/world/middleeast/22iraq-top.html?_r=1&
hp&oref=login
[14]
https://www.janes.com/images/assets/242/73242/Kurdish_referendum_provides_st
ep_towards_independence.pdf
[15] https://www.rudaw.net/english/kurdistan/090820175
[16]
http://www.joshualandis.com/blog/iraqi-minorities-face-dilemma-kurdish-indep
endence/
[17]
https://www.amnesty.org.uk/press-releases/iraq-yezidis-carried-out-village-m
assacre-sunnis-anti-islamic-state-backlash
[18] mailto:corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx?subject=Typo on Genocide in Iraq: When
Local Sunni Became ISIS and Slaughtered Their
Neighbors&body=URL:http://www.alternet.org/grayzone-project/genocide-iraq-wh
en-local-sunni-became-isis-and-slaughtered-their-neighbors
[19] https://www.alternet.org/
[20] https://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
