LONDON: For twelve days in August 2014, the lives of the residents of the Yazidi village of Kocho hung in fearful limbo.

In the early hours of August 3, Daesh fighters advanced west from Mosul and attacked the city of Sinjar and dozens of Yazidi villages south of the Sinjar Mountains in the northern Iraqi province of Nineveh.

Kocho’s 1,200 or so residents were awakened at around 2 a.m. by gunfire from surrounding villages, fearing that their turn could be at any moment.

It did indeed happen, and in the most brutal way possible. But Kocho suffered a fate that was unique compared to the more than 80 Yazidi villages in the region.

For reasons that remain largely unclear to this day, Daesh commanders decided to keep the besieged villagers of Kocho trapped between hope and fear for almost two terrible weeks.

And on August 15, 2014, exactly 10 years ago this week, hope gave way to horror.

The Yazidis, an ethnic-religious minority in northern Iraq and parts of Syria and Turkey, had suffered centuries of persecution, but the extent of the persecution they now faced was unthinkable.

The leadership of the so-called caliphate proclaimed two months earlier by Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi viewed the Yazidis as infidels and sought nothing less than genocide in August 2014.

Thousands of men, women and children were murdered and their bodies thrown into dozens of hastily dug mass graves scattered over a wide area.

More than 6,000 women and young girls were enslaved and physically and sexually abused. Ten years later, 2,600 of them are still missing.

The survivors were driven from their homes and sought refuge first on the barren heights of the Sinjar Mountains, where many young children died of dehydration, and later in the camps for internally displaced people that sprung up in Iraqi Kurdistan.

Ten years after the massacres, 200,000 Yazidis still live in these camps. They are refugees in their own country and are unable or afraid to return to their destroyed homeland.

But in Kocho, a small village 15 kilometers south of Sinjar, everything was different – ​​at first.

On the morning of the attack, a unit of the Peshmerga, the army of the autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan Region, which was stationed in the village school, fled the village as Daesh advanced. A similar situation occurred throughout Sinjar.

Several hundred residents of Kocho left the city at the same time as its would-be defenders, hoping to reach the relative safety of the Sinjar Mountains to the north. Some made it. Others were captured along the way.

What happened next was a reflection of one of the lesser-known tragedies of ISIS’s genocide against the Yazidis.

There is a widespread belief that the Daesh fighters who swept through Sinjar in 2014 were all foreigners, mostly volunteers from abroad who had followed Daesh’s murderous call to Syria.

In fact, many of the Daesh fighters who committed such horrific crimes against the Yazidis were not foreigners or strangers, but their neighbors.

“It is difficult to compile accurate statistics,” says Natia Navrouzov, a Georgia-born Yazidi lawyer who led Yazda’s legal advocacy and documentation project, collecting evidence of Daesh’s crimes. She is now the nongovernmental organization’s executive director.

“But as for the testimonies of the survivors that we have collected, they often say that Daesh members came mainly from Al-Ba’aj, a region in Sinjar, and that many neighboring countries then joined.”

The town of Al-Ba’aj is located about 20 kilometers southwest of Kocho.

Although many of the Daesh attackers wore masks, when Yazda collected testimonies, survivors were able to “clearly identify them by their names, based on their tribe and their dialect, because the accent they spoke with was clearly from a particular tribe or village in Sinjar.”

“As for the foreign fighters, they were mainly present in Raqqa, Syria, and the Daesh attacks on the Yazidis in Sinjar in the first few days were actually locally controlled.”

Many Yazidis also maintained economic and social relations with their neighbors who turned against them.

“We have statements from survivors who say that even before August 3, they sensed certain movements of these neighbors looting their belongings or watching them.

“Some neighbors even called some of the Yazidis they knew and liked to tell them, ‘You should go because something is going to happen.’ But I think the Yazidis just didn’t realize that it was going to be a genocide. They just thought something political was going to happen.”

The worst betrayal came from people who were closely connected to Yazidi families.

“There were social connections,” Navrouzov said. “For example, when a Yazidi child is born, he or she gets a godfather who is the equivalent of the Western godfather, a so-called ‘kreef.’ The kreef is often an Arab. Many Yazidis had these almost familial connections with their neighbors, and yet they were attacked even by these people.”

This should not have been a big surprise, said Navrouzov, “because in the past we were often attacked by our neighbors.” The reason for this was persistent misunderstandings about the Yazidis’ faith. Among other things, they claimed that they were devil worshippers – a lie exploited by Daesh propaganda.

But even now, “ten years after the genocide, and despite all the documentation we have collected and the advocacy we and others have done, many people in Iraqi society still believe that we are exaggerating and that Daesh did not commit the crimes we describe.”

Worse than this denial is that “some people still believe that Daesh’s actions are right because the ideology behind it is so deeply rooted in society.”

According to some reports, the leader of the Daesh attack on Kocho may have been a local who was initially hesitant to obey orders from above. Others believe that local Kreefs may have intervened to try to spare the village.

Either way, Kocho – the only one of the more than 80 Yazidi villages in the area that was simply overrun – was subjected to a 12-day siege.

“The devastating thing is that the village was surrounded for about two weeks, from August 3 to August 15,” said Abid Shamdeen, who was studying in the United States at the University of Nebraska at the time and helped mobilize support in the Yazidi diaspora.

“We knew that Daesh had killed the men they had captured on August 3 and that they had captured women and children in other villages.

“We have communicated with US officials, with Iraqi and Kurdish officials, trying to convey the message to them that Daesh will commit a massacre in Kocho. But they have received no help.”

On August 3, Daesh first entered the village and issued its usual ultimatum: convert to Islam or die. But over the next twelve days, Daesh commander “Abu Hamza” held a series of negotiations with village leaders, including village chief Sheikh Ahmed Jasso.

Whatever the reason for the 12-day grace period, on August 15, 2014, the talks ended and the remaining 1,200 residents of Kocho were herded into the village school.

What happened next is described in shocking detail in the book “The Last Girl: My Story of Captivity and Fight against the Islamic State” by Nadia Murad.

At the school, the men and boys who were considered adolescents were separated from the women, loaded onto trucks and driven away to be murdered. In total, 600 people died, including six of Murad’s brothers and half-brothers. The women at the school could hear the gunshots that killed their sons, brothers and husbands.

Dozens of elderly women who were considered too old to be sold as sex slaves were also killed, including Murad’s mother Shami.

The fate that awaited Murad and many other young women from Kocho, including underage girls, was sexual slavery. They were driven to Mosul and sold to Daesh fighters and supporters. In total, an estimated 3,000 Yazidi women were enslaved.

Murad’s ordeal lasted until November 2014, when she managed to escape her captor. She found her way to a camp for displaced persons and from there successfully applied for asylum in Germany, where she arrived in 2014.

She then founded the non-governmental organization “Nadia’s Initiative” and received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2018 for her “efforts to end the use of sexual violence as a weapon in wars and armed conflicts”.

The horrific story of ISIS’s genocidal attack on the Yazidis, the struggle for justice and the ongoing search for the missing a decade later are told in an Arab News Minority Report published online here (link to detailed coverage).