Reliving Trauma Again and Again in Pursuit of Justice
A Yezidi woman documents her own people’s testimony about genocide.
Waheeda Omer relives the most frightening day of her life over and over again.
As an investigator for the Free Yezidi Foundation, she interviews people who survived a genocide in 2014, when IS (Islamic State) fighters attacked villages in northern Iraq. She is also a survivor.
Omer awoke on August 3, 2014, to the sounds of gunfire and panic in her village, Tel Banat, Iraq. At about 8 a.m., she, her parents, and several siblings piled into their small car. She was 19 years old, and they had heard IS was “bad for girls.” Omer didn’t know what it meant at the time.
Now, interviewing survivors, she hears firsthand accounts of rape and sexual captivity.
On that morning, her family started driving toward Iraqi Kurdistan, where other family members were living. Her father picked out roads across the desert and through towns, at one point abruptly making a U-turn when they saw IS fighters ahead of them. Neighbors fled to Mount Sinjar, which was later encircled by IS. But Omer’s family made it to safety by that evening.
When they left their home, “we thought we would come back by that afternoon.” Instead, they settled in with relatives and she started at university that fall, majoring in English. Nine years later, her family still has not returned home, because they do not yet feel safe. For Omer, devoting her life in the years since to education and justice work has provided some answers about what they experienced.
“We were running from death — just because of who we are,” Omer said. “The term ‘minority’ — we didn’t know what it is. … We didn’t have internet. We weren’t aware of what was going on in the world.”
Before August 2014, they had been living in peace but had little else. Since then, Omer has come to view her childhood through an outsider’s lens.
“The education system was not good. The water system was not good. Basic life services were not provided.” Men worked as farmers or joined the military to support their families. The land was dry and brown. Kids didn’t have toys they wanted or bicycles or parks to play in, she said. But they also didn’t focus on religion or what divided them from neighbors.
Now, through experience and study, she understands prejudice, hate, and genocide. She knows her community was driven from their homes, families were separated, and thousands were killed merely because of their Yezidi religion. And that hatred has not gone away. Periodically in Kurdistan, Omer experiences a rise in hate speech about Yezidis that prompts her to conceal her identity for her own safety. She will speak with a local accent instead of her native accent, so she won’t be identified as a Yezidi in public.
What would make her feel more secure? If IS fighters, those who terrorized her people, were brought to justice in Iraq. That might make it possible for her and her community to return to the homes they abandoned nine years ago. To leave the tent camps where many still live. Justice would demonstrate the possibility of investing in a future in Iraq. Without justice, she feels what happened before could easily happen again.
This hope for justice drives her to document what happened. Despite the pain of hearing about the same terrifying days over and over again, she feels uniquely suited to make a difference.
Survivors “are proud of me, a Yezidi woman, doing this job,” she said. The Yezidi women she interviews tell her that it is the first time they have felt comfortable sharing their entire story.
She did not grow up expecting a career. “I went to school but in my village, only two women were working. People said bad stuff about these women because they were working.”
Now, Omer works for a women-led organization that fights for justice and provides support to her people as they process the trauma they have experienced. Treatment for mental health is something else she has only learned about since 2014.
With so many changes in less than a decade, her hope for even more progress does not seem unfounded.
“Yezidis were not in places where they could share the truth, the reality. Maybe the reason we went through all this is because there was no justice,” she reflects. “To fight for justice is something to actually be proud of.”
As the tenth anniversary of the 2014 genocide committed by IS approaches, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Simon-Skjodt Center for the Prevention of Genocide is working with the Free Yezidi Foundation and other Yezidi organizations to galvanize attention about the ongoing risks facing the group. We aim to raise awareness of policy options for preventing future crimes and advancing accountability. Learn more about the ongoing risk of mass atrocities facing civilians in northern Iraq.
