About the Genocide Documentation Project

Yazda’s Genocide Documentation Project was launched in October 2015 to gather as much evidence as possible on the genocide committed against the Yazidis. Since then, the documentation team has been collecting evidence in the form of witness and survivor interviews, in addition to visual material on mass graves and kill sites in and around Sinjar, Nineveh Province, where the genocide took place. The members of the team follow internationally accepted evidence-gathering procedures and guidelines in documenting IS atrocities and are supported by a legal team to ensure adherence to such standards.

The Genocide Documentation Project aims to:

• Document, consolidate, and archive existing survivor and witness testimonies on the genocide against Yazidis as well as the destruction of Yazidi cultural heritage sites in Sinjar prior to the genocide to inform future academic and public inquires,
• Support the legal work, including that of Amal Clooney, coun- sel to Yazda, United Nations Goodwill Ambassador Nadia Murad, and other survivors of the Yazidi Genocide, to pursue accountability before international and domestic courts for the crimes committed against the Yazidis,
• Provide support and background information to further domestic and international advocacy efforts that work to improve the conditions of Yazidis.

The Genocide Documentation Project is now generously funded by Free A Girl for a period of six months. Yazda’s documentation team is also collaborating with the Forensic Architecture Agency at Goldsmiths, University in London on a training and visual doc- umentation project which is supported by the Victoria and Albert Museum in collaboration with Art Jameel, as well as by the British Council and Arts Council England.

Documentation of mass graves and kill sites has been a priority of Yazda’s Genocide Documentation Project since the project’s inception. The need for support by civil society organizations to complement and inform large-scale documentation and preservation efforts by official bodies has rendered Yazda’s documentation efforts indispensable.

On January 28, 2016, Yazda published its first report on mass graves in Sinjar, entitled “Mass Graves of Yazidis Killed by the Islamic State Organization or Local Affiliates On or After August 3, 2014” (“2016 Report”)1. The 2016 Report was issued by Yazda prior to the international community’s consensus that the atrocities against Yazidis in Sinjar constituted genocide. One of the stated objectives of the 2016 Report was “to collect evidence of crimes of genocide against the Yazidi people in the effort to secure genocide recognition for the Yazidi case.”2 In June 2016, the United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic published the findings of its investigation into the Yazidi case. The Commission’s focus on atrocities and enslavement occurring inside Syria had necessitated extending its investigation into Sinjar due to the trans-border nature of the crimes committed by IS. The Commission’s report, published by the United Nations Human Rights Council, was entitled “They Came to Destroy: ISIS Crimes Against the Yazidis.”3 The Commission conducted its own research and relied on a number of resources produced by other research entities, one of which was Yazda’s 2016 Report.4 Importantly, the Commission’s report made a strong declaration of recognition of the Yazidi case as genocide, after which the term “Yazidi Genocide” gained traction in international discourse about atrocities committed by IS in Iraq.

This report is intended as a complement to the 2016 Report and presents subsequent findings of Yazda’s Genocide Documentation Project in the south of Sinjar Mountain in addition to Tel Afar and Qasr al-Mihrab. As this new report provides data on mass graves discovered since the publication of the 2016 Report—but does not revisit each site reported in the first report—both reports should be consulted together.

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