Author(s)

Jan Ilhan Kizilhan^1,2

¹The Institute for Transcultural Health Science, Baden-Wuerttemberg Cooperative State University, Villingen-Schwenningen, Germany.
²Institute für Psychotherapy and Psychotraumatology, University of Duhok, KRI, Iraq.

In 2014 the troops of the self-proclaimed “Islamic State” conquered the areas of northern Iraq and turned on the long-established religious minorities in the area with tremendous brutality, especially towards the Yazidi. Huge numbers of men were executed; thousands upon thousands of women and children were abducted and wilfully subjected to sexual violence. Although the Yazidi have violated religious rules which have existed for over 800 years by taking women back who have been raped during their captivity at the hands of the IS, they refuse to accept the children resulting from rape by IS terrorists because a person can only be Yazidi by birth. The Yazidis therefore faced with the question as to how far the Yazidi community is coping with the disaster and the new challenges of a changed society with regard to human rights.

Yazidi, Terror, Religion, Human Rights, Society, ISIS

Kizilhan, J. (2019) Changes in the Yazidi Society and Religion after the Genocide—A Growing Rapprochement with Human Rights?. Open Journal of Social Sciences, 7, 7-17. doi: 10.4236/jss.2019.77002.