More than a decade after ISIS militants unleashed a campaign of mass killings, sexual slavery and forced displacement against Iraq's Yazidi minority, survivor groups and international legal experts are launching a landmark truth commission aimed at confronting what they describe as the world's failure to deliver justice for the victims of genocide.
For many survivors, the initiative represents a final attempt to transform recognition into accountability.
“We have nothing left in Iraq,” said one Yazidi woman now living in Germany. “Only bones.”
The first community-based truth commission dedicated to the Yazidi genocide will convene in Germany's parliament, the Bundestag, from November 16 to 18.
Organisers say Germany was chosen because it is home to the world's largest Yazidi diaspora community, many of whom arrived after fleeing ISIS atrocities in northern Iraq.
Over three days, more than 30 survivor-experts, legal scholars and human rights specialists are expected to testify about crimes committed by ISIS between 2014 and 2017, and the limited international efforts to prosecute those responsible.
The hearings will include accounts from women and girls subjected to sexual slavery and from men who were abducted as children and forced into ISIS indoctrination programmes.
ISIS swept across northern Iraq in August 2014, overrunning the Yazidi homeland around Sinjar. Roughly 400,000 Yazidis fled to the neighbouring Kurdistan Region, while tens of thousands became trapped on Mount Sinjar, where they faced starvation and dehydration before humanitarian corridors were opened.
Those unable to escape faced a brutal campaign of extermination. ISIS considered Yazidis “infidels” and ordered men to convert or die. Women and girls were systematically abducted, sold, raped, and forced into marriage and religious conversion.
More than 6,000 women and children were taken captive by ISIS, according to Yazidi organisations, and nearly 2,800 remain missing today.
Investigators later found that sexual violence was not incidental but was codified in ISIS regulations, used deliberately as a weapon of war.
The UN, as well as the governments of the US, Britain, Germany, France and Iraq, has formally recognised ISIS's actions as genocide. Yet advocates argue that recognition has not translated into meaningful accountability.
Aldo Zammit-Borda, a law professor at the University of London and one of the commission's organisers, said the initiative comes as the world approaches the 12th anniversary of the genocide amid what he described as a “troubling paradox".
“There has been very little justice or accountability for that genocide, and this is not a matter of choice for states,” he told The National. “States have ratified the Genocide Convention. They have obligations to prevent and punish genocide, and they haven't. There’s a clear need and a clear gap that we are trying to address with this Truth Commission.”
While hundreds of ISIS members have been prosecuted on terrorism-related charges in Europe and Iraq, convictions specifically for genocide have been rare.
“The lack of convictions for genocide has left the Yazidi community in a state of recognition without redress,” Mr Zammit-Borda said.
The commission will be chaired by the British human rights lawyer Baroness Helena Kennedy and will include an international panel of commissioners from Europe, Africa and Asia, among them Judge Navi Pillay, the former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.
The effort comes two years after the closure of the UN Investigative Team to Promote Accountability for Crimes Committed by ISIS, which spent years collecting evidence of atrocities in Iraq but stopped operations in 2024.
The commission plans to publish a report in 2027 containing recommendations for governments and international institutions.
“Governments have a choice,” said Raminder Kaur, a professor at the University of Manchester. “Stand by the Yazidi community until justice is delivered or do nothing and send a signal that genocide is no longer a crime that will be prevented and punished by the international community.”
