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This paper reads the testimonies of Yazidi women who survived their slavery at the hands of ISIS (DAESH) to understand how this 'minoritized' body, a term coined by Arjun Appadurai, has become a worldwide signifier. Due to the circulation of images and technologies, the testimonies of those women who survived have become the only means that allows visibility; yet, the visibility of the violated minoritized body is a fact that still signifies power and instills worldwide horror. The paper attempts to understand how the minoritized individual body has become a body politic, onto which power relations are played out and where several discourses intersect.

AbstractWhen the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) emerged from the ashes of unsolved political, religious, and sectarian conflicts in the Middle East, it became one of the greatest threats to global order in recent years. It invaded and occupied a large swath of territory in Iraq and Syria, leaving a trail of bloodshed in its wake. ISIS fighters carried out a deliberate campaign of annihilation against the religious Yazidi community, which is officially recognized as a protected group under the UN Genocide Convention. ISIS identified them as an "unbeliever community" and proceeded to embark on an eliminationist campaign against the group, including deliberate killing, destruction of the conditions of their life, and the capture and transference of Yazidi children.

AbstractResettlement to a new country is a period of adjustment for all youth refugees, especially for highly traumatized groups of refugees, such as the Yazidi population. This study explores adjustment challenges faced by Yazidi youth refugees in Canada using group concept mapping. 12 Yazidi youth participated. Seven concepts represent the statements, including family stress and adjustment, the experience of instability and fear, navigating the differences between countries, starting over, getting used to school, the impact of war and my discomfort. The findings from this study were compared and contrasted with the existing literature.

ISIS is well known for its brutal mistreatment of those deemed 'enemies' and 'infidels'. In the Kurdistan region of Iraq, having been abducted by ISIS in 2014, many Yazidi women were subjected to different types of violence: sexual, physical and mental. This study investigates how silence was employed by these women as a security strategy to survive their brutal mistreatment under ISIS. The use of silence as a security strategy challenges the assumption that silence is a sign of disempowerment. Drawing on feminist security studies, this study proposes an alternative analysis of security, agency and gendered violence; it demonstrates the need to recognise the complex strategies these Yazidi women developed to resist ISIS rule. It suggests that this approach may be used to critique established narratives about women in the Global South and reveal the under-reported security strategies women employ in conflict settings.

With testimony drawn from more than 200 interviews with Yazidi survivors--girls, women, boys, and men--recorded during 11 investigative trips to refugee camps in Iraqi Kurdistan. The massacre of the Yazidi people by ISIS was nothing less than genocide. In refugee camps in Iraqi Kurdistan, the authors brought a skilled team to interview more than a hundred ISIS survivors and document what they experienced and saw. These former slaves observed their torturers and know from the inside the secret facilities that ISIS has kept hidden from the world. What their testimony reveals is an organization whose ambition is power, regardless of their claim to be "soldiers of God." Their fighters are paid with sex, money, and the power of life and death over captives. Their promised paradise is here and now, not after death. Men who didn't swear allegiance were executed. Women became slaves for sex or reproduction, and their offspring may still serve the cause. In mobile training camps, the captured children were drugged, indoctrinated, and taught to shoot Kalashnikovs, plant explosives, and handle suicide vests. They are the intended products of the terrorist factory. In this taut, disturbing account, the authors document a utilitarian genocide that still holds an implicit threat to other counties, including those in the West

Although as of early 2019 ISIS has lost all of the territories it occupied, scholarly and media attention has continued to focus on its barbarity and brutal treatment of the women living in its former territories. The extremist group has committed a long list of severe human rights violations since it seized territories in Iraq and Syria. In this article, I aim to illustrate the reporting of this violence against the Yazidi women from 2014 to 2019 by the UK's national newspapers because the media's portrayal of these women shapes public opinion and policy towards this group in relation to the violence they have endured. The results indicate that while UK national newspapers give preferential treatment in their coverage of Yazidi women's experiences of violence, abuse, and torture, they often ignore these women's agency and activism in terms of the extent to which these women resisted and coped with the atrocities they endured.