Islamic State’s genocide was not limited to killing and enslaving Yazidis, Christians and other communities − it also erased their heritage

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Alda Benjamen, University of Dayton

(THE CONVERSATION) August 2024 marks the 10-year anniversary of the Islamic State group’s genocide, in which thousands of people from Iraq’s marginalized communities, including Yazidis, Christians and Shiite Muslims, were killed in Iraq’s second-largest city, Mosul, and the surrounding areas.

The Yazidis, who follow a monotheistic religion, in which the Peacock Angel is chief among seven divine beings, and have been persecuted periodically in the past, suffered gravely. From 2014 to 2017, at least 5,000 were brutally killed, while 6,000 women and children were enslaved; hundreds of thousands were displaced from Sinjar and the Nineveh Plains, near Mosul.

Iraq’s Assyrian Christians, who belong to a native Mesopotamian community consisting of early converts to a Syriac form of Eastern Christianity, also suffered under IS. In Mosul, IS marked Christian homes and forced them to either pay jizya, a tax historically levied upon...