This week, a Yazidi activist named Pari Ibrahim told a UN Security Council meeting about 19 of her female relatives captured by Daesh (ISIS) militants last year. Two escaped, she told the meeting, while the rest are believed to be enslaved, or “worse.”
It’s a story we’ve heard many time before. But Ibrahim’s seeking a legal definition from the International Criminal Court (ICC)—genocide.
The Yazidis are a largely Kurdish group who follow a combination of Islam, Christianity and Zoroastrianism. But few people had even heard of the quiet Iraqi minority until last August, when Daesh slaughtered at least 2,000 of its members during a brutal siege in Iraq’s Sinjar Mountain and Nineveh Plain.
On the ground, the shocking plight changed a lot of things. It sparked the US’s latest intervention in Iraq. And today, harrowing stories like Ibrahim’s keep flooding out from Daesh territory.
But the legal recognition Ibrahim’s after at the ICC won’t come easy. Here’s why.
1.The definition is quite vague. The ICC’s founding treaty, the Rome Statute, constitutes genocide as the killings or other atrocities “committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.”
2. That could cover a lot of what’s happened in Syria over the last five years, but it doesn’t. In 2014, Russia and China vetoed a draft UN Resolution to refer the whole conflict to the ICC. Moscow, who we now know as one the Syrian government’s best buddies, did this to prevent the pursuit of Assad for war crimes—i.e. widespread barrel bombs, chemical attack allegations, you get the picture.
3. Ibrahim’s trying for a different solution, but it has obstacles, too. The activist proposed a new draft UN resolution that would exclude Assad and keep ICC’s jurisdiction limited to genocide and war crimes committed against the Yazidis. But so far, the only absolute, non-contested genocide in the ICC’s eyes is the Holocaust. And there’s a long, slow line of groups ahead of the Yazidis looking for legal designation for other mass atrocities.
By Elizabeth Tarbell
