“ISIS attacked us because they said we weren’t true believers. They said we didn’t believe in God—but that’s just not true. We have our own faith, our way of worshiping the divine. It’s different sure, but that doesn’t make it wrong. They tried to erase us, force us to convert, to forget our language, everything that made us Yazidi, but they failed,” said former Yazidi slave, Faiza Qasim, featured in a new documentary 10 YEARS ON: The Yazidi Genocide.
The documentary unwraps the 2014 ISIS genocide against Iraq’s 400,000 Yazidi community in Sinjar—a religious community, indigenous to Mesopotamia since the 12th century. An episode of the Faces of Persecution: Exploring Global Religious Oppressions documentary mini-series,10 YEARS ON is a harrowing visual journey of ISIS executions of Yazidi men and boys and the enslavement of nearly 7,000 women and girls forcibly converted and transferred throughout Iraq and Syria. Profiling former slaves’ courageous escapes, and unyielding religious belief honors the 2,700 Yazidi women still enslaved by ISIS.
Interviews with religious historians, regional experts, and activists including Matthew Travis Barber (University of Chicago), human rights lawyer Knox Thames (Pepperdine University, Author: Ending Persecution), Mirza Dinnayi (Luftbrücke Irak), and Pastor William Devlin (Widows & Orphans Foundation) provide historical backdrops, reveal rare scenes of ISIS brutalities against tens of thousands of Yazidis trapped on 4,800-foot-high Mt. Sinjar, and unveils sacred Yazidi religious practices.
Read the rest of the story at Newsweek.