We Will Never Forget: The Enduring Wounds of the Yezidi Genocide

Jihan Alou is a researcher and political writer

Remembering August 3: we will never forget When Yezidi Existence Becomes a Crime

There are atrocities measured by the number of victims, and there are crimes whose impact reaches far beyond wounding the very idea upon which human existence rests. Genocide is not merely the bloodiest of crimes; it is the most hostile to human nature. It does not seek a body to kill, but an identity to erase, a memory to wipe out, and a future to forbid from ever being born.

Genocide does not begin when knives are drawn, nor when mass graves are dug. It begins in that dark moment when a killer convinces himself that another human being has no right to exist at all. In that instant, a name becomes an accusation, belonging becomes a sentence, belief becomes a cause for death .

The cruelty of August 3rd upon Shingal was not just a military invasion, nor simply another chapter in the Middle East’s long history of violence. It was a cold, explicit declaration that a person could be slaughtered not for bearing arms, nor for committing a fault, but simply for being born Yezidi. It was an attempt to uproot an ancient people, as if their very presence were a historical mistake that needed correcting.

That is the most terrifying essence of genocide: it does not judge actions; it judges existence itself. It does not ask who the victim is morally, but who they are by identity. This is why it knows no innocence in childhood, no reverence for old age, no sanctity for women, and no holiness for places of worship. A child is slain for carrying a name, a woman is enslaved for her faith, an elder is executed for preserving his beliefs, and a temple is razed to destroy its quiet witness that these people were here for centuries .

Terrorist organizations as ISIS do not fear strength as much as they fear diversity and authenticity. They cannot survive in a world that recognizes value in difference, and so they attempt to rewrite life according to a single logic: those who resemble us deserve life; those who differ deserve only to perish. In doing so, they do not only murder individuals, but they seek to destroy the sacred principle of human plurality.

Yet this tragedy extends far beyond the hands that drew the blade. A knife needs a hand, a hand needs a mind fed on hatred, and hatred needs a fertile culture that tolerates it while silence grants it time to bloom into mass graves.

Genocide is forged not by the killer alone, but by every discourse that strips humanity from another, every policy that normalizes hatred, and every world that grows so accustomed to watching massacres that it loses the capacity to feel horror.

This is why yezidi genocide feels far crueler than death itself. Death is the end of an individual, but this genocide is an attempt to erase time itself for an entire community; their language, prayers, songs, village names, and ancestral memories. It is a simultaneous war on the past, the present, and the future.

To say that the Yezidis "survived" carries a quiet cruelty of its own. Survival is not justice. To remain alive after your entire world has been shattered is less of a miracle and more of an agonizing burden. What kind of survival leaves a mother searching for her missing child after years of silence? What kind of deliverance forces a child to grow up knowing nothing but refugee camps and exile? The survivors do not merely carry life; they carry the weight of the genocide within them wherever they go.

Shingal is not a name for a tragedy that has passed; it is a mirror reflecting the world’s moral conscience. Every delay in delivering justice, every hesitation in uncovering the fate of the missing, and every failure to restore a dignified life means that the crime has not ended it has merely assumed another form.

The wounds of the Yezidis are not the private grief of a single community, but a scar on the conscience of all Kurdistan and the wider human family. Unless this genocide is held as the supreme national and moral cause, it will remain an open wound in our shared memory.

On the anniversary of August 3rd, we should not ask how much time has passed, but how much of the genocide still remains. Time is not measured in years, but in justice. As long as a mother does not know her child's grave, a village lacks its pulse, and a child learns exile instead of home, the genocide has not yet become history.

August 3rd is not a memory to be recalled once a year, but a moral covenant to be renewed: a pledge that no people will ever be left alone because their identity differs from their murderer, that hatred will never wear the cloak of faith, and that the truth will remain alive.

When existence itself becomes an accusation, defending the survivors becomes a defense of humanity as a whole.

May peace rest upon the martyrs of the Yezidi genocide, may the chains of the missing be broken, may the wounded find healing, and may strength and comfort fill the hearts of their families.

We will never forget you .