ISIS and Iraq's Minorities in 2014: Christians, Turkmen, Shia, Yazidis

In the summer of 2014 the Islamic State group (ISIS) swept across northern Iraq and turned on the region's minorities. Christians in Mosul were ordered to convert, pay a religious tax or leave. Shia Turkmen villages were attacked, and hundreds of captured Shia cadets were executed near Tikrit. On 3 August ISIS overran Sinjar, killing and enslaving thousands of Yazidis. Human Rights Watch documented abductions, killings and expulsions as they happened, and later investigations confirmed the worst fears: the United States, the UK parliament, several other states and a UN investigative team concluded that ISIS committed genocide against the Yazidis, and US officials also named Christians and Shia Muslims as victims.

This article sets out what happened to each community, what was known at the time, and what later findings established.

Christians, Turkmen, Shiites and Yazidis Are Facing Real Genocide By ISIS

Civilians who fled Mosul queue at a camp near Erbil in June 2014, days after the city fell.

Why Iraq's minorities were so exposed

Northern Iraq, and especially Nineveh province around Mosul, was one of the most religiously mixed places in the Middle East. Assyrian and other Christians, Yazidis, Shabak, Shia and Sunni Turkmen, Kaka'i and others lived alongside Sunni Arab and Kurdish majorities, many of them in the disputed belt between federal Iraq and the Kurdistan Region. Smaller groups had no militia or state of their own to protect them, and when the Iraqi army collapsed in June 2014 they were left in the path of the advance.

ISIS ideology treated Shia Muslims and Yazidis as apostates or unbelievers to be killed or enslaved, and Christians as subjects who could survive only by submission. In July 2014 Human Rights Watch warned that belonging to one of these groups in ISIS-held territory could cost a person their property, freedom or life, and urged the group to stop its campaign against minorities around Mosul.

Christians: the Mosul ultimatum and the flight from Nineveh

Mosul had one of the oldest Christian communities in the world. After ISIS took the city on 10 June 2014, Christian families began leaving under threats and pressure. Human Rights Watch, citing local church leaders, reported that fighters marked Christian homes with the Arabic letter nun (ن), for Nasrani, "Christian", and labelled them property of the Islamic State.

A girl carrying her family's bags reaches a Kurdish checkpoint after escaping Mosul, June 2014.

In mid-July ISIS issued an ultimatum: Christians must convert to Islam, pay the jizya tax demanded of non-Muslims, or leave by 19 July, with death as the alternative. Most chose to go. Families were reportedly stopped at checkpoints and stripped of money, cars and belongings, arriving in Kurdish-held Erbil and Dohuk with little more than the clothes they wore.

Christian girls at prayer in a church in Bartella, a town near Mosul, in June 2014. Bartella itself fell to ISIS weeks later.

In early August ISIS pushed into the Nineveh Plains, the Christian heartland east of Mosul, taking Qaraqosh and neighbouring towns. More than 100,000 Christians fled in a matter of days. Churches and schools in Erbil became shelters.

Displaced Christian families settle inside St Joseph's Church in Erbil in August 2014.

Pope Francis appealed publicly for prayers for Iraqi Christians and all vulnerable people in the region. The long-term toll has been severe: US State Department estimates cited on Wikipedia put Iraq's Christian population at about 1.2 million in 2011 and roughly 120,000 by 2024. Many who fled never returned, even after Mosul and the Nineveh Plains were retaken.

Turkmen: villages, Tal Afar and the siege of Amirli

Turkmen, a Turkic-speaking people, are Iraq's third-largest ethnic group, with estimates ranging up to around a tenth of the population. They are split between Sunni and Shia communities, and ISIS targeted Shia Turkmen in particular as apostates.

In June 2014 the Washington Post reported survivors' accounts of an attack on four farming villages south of Kirkuk, in which at least 40 Shia Turkmen were believed killed; hundreds of families fled to Kirkuk. Tal Afar, a mostly Turkmen city west of Mosul that had already suffered years of sectarian bombings, fell to ISIS the same month, and its Shia residents fled en masse.

Cars full of families fleeing the fighting wait at the Kurdish checkpoint at Aski Kalak, June 2014.

The Shia Turkmen town of Amirli was besieged for weeks over the summer, its residents cut off from food and water until Iraqi forces and militias, backed by US airstrikes, broke the siege at the end of August. Turkey announced plans to build camps for displaced Turkmen in northern Iraq.

Shia Muslims: the Camp Speicher massacre

The single deadliest atrocity of that June took place near Tikrit. On 12 June 2014 ISIS fighters captured thousands of mostly Shia air force cadets and recruits leaving Camp Speicher, separated them by sect and shot them in mass executions, filming many of the killings for propaganda. Estimates of the dead range from about 1,095 to 1,700. The often-quoted figure of 1,700 is the higher end; Iraq's human rights ministry later listed 1,095 people as missing.

Mass graves were uncovered after Iraqi forces retook Tikrit in 2015. Iraq hanged 36 men for the massacre in August 2016, and further trials followed.

Residents of Mosul walk over the rubble of the shrine of the Prophet Yunus (Jonah), which ISIS blew up in July 2014.

ISIS also attacked Shia and Sufi shrines and mosques, including the revered shrine of Jonah in Mosul. In Syria, the same group was fighting the forces of President Bashar al-Assad, whose Alawite sect grew out of Shia Islam, and it applied the same label of unbelief to Alawites.

Yazidis: Sinjar and genocide

The Yazidis are an ancient religious community whose faith grew from pre-Islamic Kurdish beliefs and the teachings of the twelfth-century Sufi Sheikh Adi. Their holiest site is Lalish, in northern Iraq. Many Yazidis speak Kurdish; some identify as Kurds and others as a separate people. Outsiders have long misrepresented their reverence for the angel figure Tawûsî Melek, the Peacock Angel, as "devil worship", a slander that ISIS used to justify killing them.

Displaced Yazidi families set up camp near Fishkhabour, by the Syrian border, on 9 August 2014.

On 3 August 2014 ISIS stormed the Sinjar region after Kurdish forces withdrew. Men and older boys were massacred; women and girls were abducted, sold and held as sex slaves; boys were taken to be trained as fighters. Tens of thousands of people, with estimates from 30,000 to 50,000, fled up Mount Sinjar with almost no water in the August heat. US airstrikes began on 8 August, airdrops of supplies followed, and Syrian Kurdish fighters opened a corridor for many to escape.

Yazidi women and girls who escaped Sinjar take refuge in a school in Dohuk in early August 2014.

The United Nations later estimated that about 5,000 Yazidis were killed and about 7,000 women and girls abducted in August 2014; a 2017 household survey published in PLOS Medicine gave ranges of 2,100 to 4,400 deaths and 4,200 to 10,800 abductions. More than half a million people were displaced, and thousands remained missing for years.

Vian Dakhil, then the only Yazidi member of Iraq's parliament, broke down in the chamber in early August 2014 as she pleaded for help for her people, telling fellow MPs that Yazidis were being slaughtered. Her appeal was shared around the world.

(The video originally embedded here is no longer available on YouTube.)

What later investigations concluded

In 2014 the word "genocide" was an urgent warning. Within a few years it became a formal finding:

March 2016: the US House of Representatives voted 393 to 0 to call the atrocities genocide, and on 17 March Secretary of State John Kerry said ISIS was responsible for genocide against Yazidis, Christians and Shia Muslims in areas it controlled.
April 2016: the UK House of Commons unanimously backed a motion recognising genocide against Yazidis and Christians.
2016 and 2017: the UN Commission of Inquiry on Syria found that ISIS was committing genocide against the Yazidis.
May 2021: the UN investigative team UNITAD reported clear and convincing evidence that ISIS committed genocide against the Yazidis in Iraq.
January 2023: Germany's Bundestag unanimously recognised the Yazidi genocide; courts in Germany had already convicted ISIS members for crimes against Yazidis.

Mosul was retaken by Iraqi forces in 2017, and ISIS lost its last territory in Syria in 2019. Many survivors still live in camps, Sinjar remains damaged and contested, and families continue to search for missing relatives. Remembering what happened, and naming it accurately, is part of what survivors have asked of the world.

Sources: Human Rights Watch, July 2014: ISIS abducting, killing, expelling minorities; Wikipedia: Persecution of Christians by ISIS; Wikipedia: Camp Speicher massacre; Wikipedia: Yazidi genocide; Wikipedia: Yazidis; Wikipedia: Iraqi Turkmen; Washington Post, June 2014: Shiite villagers describe massacre; original compilation: True Activist.

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