The Future of the Yazidi Community

Abstract

This project takes an activist approach to the short and long-term issues of the Yazidi community of northern Iraq, now facing geographic separation as a direct consequence of the 2014 ISIS attacks on the Sinjar region. In this thesis, I will discuss the issues that the community faces due to geographic separation and how the community’s tight-knit belief systems and religious practices have shifted to accommodate the hardships since 2014, and how they may shift in the future. Specifically, this project is an attempt to establish and clarify how the Yazidi community now living in the United States has and is being affected by ISIS’s actions in 2014, and the reverberating effects in the community in both the United States and abroad. I claim that the political, economic, and social environment in Iraq, particularly in the 1990s and 2000s, brought about international interventions and the growth of organizations like ISIS, which in turn caused the Yazidis not just grave physical harm (and violations of human rights), but also transformations in their identity, beliefs, and practices.