This programme contains some scenes which some viewers may find upsetting.
In June, 2014, so-called Islamic State fighters occupied huge areas
of Syria and Iraq, entirely overwhelming the Yazidi community
grouped around Mount Sinjar.
Thousands of Yazidis fled before the advance.
Those that fell into IS hands were met with the utmost brutality.
Men were killed, young women forced into slavery.
In a few short weeks, a culture that had existed
for thousands of years was brought to the brink of destruction.
Though IS were eventually driven out of Iraq,
they left behind a broken society and thousands of damaged people.
What hope do the survivors of IS violence have
to rebuild their lives?
Will the Yazidis ever find justice for what has happened to them?
THEY SHOUT AND CHANT
NASHEED MUSIC
Inshallah, they're preparing to explode the building.
Right now, they're setting up the cables and the explosives,
so we'll take a look inside, Inshallah.
You see here, prisoners.
They are Yazidi people.
Look at these idiots.
THEY SCREAM AND CRY
BABY CRIES
The Yazidis' desperate attempts to escape IS by fleeing
up Mount Sinjar without either food or water were caught on camera
and broadcast all over the world.
Germany is home to more Yazidis than any other European country.
They reacted with horror to the news from Iraq, and thousands took
to the street in protest.
When you get the first information about killing and mass executions,
it was for all of us a shock, because I am a Yazidi,
my parents came from Kurdistan, I know this area, I have a lot
of relatives and friends, and they called me and said, "Please talk
"to any politicians, talk to the German government,
"do anything, we are facing a genocide and we don't know
"what we can do."
This feeling of helplessness is the worst feeling
that you can ever have as a human being.
Because you know everything, you know they will kill children,
they will behead people, they will rape women,
but you are sitting here and you cannot do anything.
SWR1 im Baden-Wurttemberg, Leute.
The young Yazidi women who were sold into sexual slavery
were trafficked to IS centres across the Arab world.
Lewiza was eventually taken to Raqqa, the biggest
IS stronghold in Syria.
Lewiza finally found safety in one of the refugee camps that appeared
in northern Iraq in the wake of the IS attacks.
And when the Yazidi woman and girls get free from the IS,
they came to refugee camps.
18,000-20,000 people live in one camp.
All Yazidis.
One tent by another one.
The conditions are very bad.
Just imagine the situation of the Yazidis, Sinjar
is destroyed by 90%.
It's not possible to go back.
We were talking with Ministers in the state of Baden-Wurttemberg,
and actually the Prime Minister, Mr Kretschmann,
came by with this idea of bringing women who were captured
by the IS to Germany.
The journalists asked, "How many girls do you want to bring?"
And I said, "Maybe I will be lucky if they will take 20 persons or 100 persons."
And he looked to the left of him and the right of him and said, "1,000",
and that was it.
And so we started with 1,000 persons.
All the money you needed to bring them to Germany and give them
a little treat and the doctors payment and houses and all things.
And we came to the amount of 95 million euros
that we need, and they said, "OK".
And then we started.
Before I went to Iraq, I had already 800 names of girls
and women captured by the IS who were now living
in refugee camps.
You know, to be honest, deciding, yes, they can come to Germany,
it was easy.
But on the other side, sure, you have to make the decision sometimes
to say, no, it's not possible.
Dr Kizilhan believed IS raped and enslaved Yazidi women as a means
to destroy the whole community.
The damage this had done made the selection process more painful.
It was really a very, very difficult situation for me,
because we know after to be raped by the IS,
many of the families expelled the girls,
and said, "you do not any more belong to our society,
"you are disowned."
More than 20 committed suicide because they were not accepted
by their own families.
You know, you feel like to make a decision
about life or not life.
18 months after her capture by IS, Lewiza finally arrived in Germany.
It was kind of a bit of stress and fear.
They don't know what has happened.
They don't know what is expected.
No-one knows really something about Germany.
And they don't know how to go to the doctor,
how to go shopping, so we have to orientate them.
We have to treat the women and girls with all the support,
with special knowledge, the doctors, translators,
social workers and psychotherapists.
Helping people with post-traumatic stress disorder has always been part
of Dr Kizilhan's practice.
Now, for the first time, he found himself responsible
for the care of members of his own community.
We have some cases where they are totally destabilised.
They have kind of lost themselves.
And for that you need to bring them to the hospital and treat
them every day.
They need a time of stabilisation.
Germany is a really different world.
Trees, traffic, police, cars, shopping centres.
Some of them had never seen a big city.
So this is kind of transcultural therapy.
They need the confrontation with their own trauma,
but for that, you have to be very strong.
Say, "Yes, I'm ready to talk about this capture,
"about the torturing, about the raping."
If you go too fast, and talk too much about this traumatic event,
you will re-traumatise this person.
And it's individuals. Someone needs three months,
someone needs maybe eight months, so we'll see how it works.
Dr Kizilhan felt it would aid the women's recovery if they knew
that the world understood the enormity
of what had happened to them.
I'm not a lawyer, but if someone is doing something
very systematically and wanted to destroy
a group, like a huge group, so it is for me a genocide.
As a psychologist, this is a continuing of fighting for identity.
It's not the problem of who did it, and maybe,
if you are thinking positive, despite all this cruelty
and all these horrors, there is also this chance that the world community
will recognise, yes, as a group in the Middle East,
they are called Yazidis, they have rights, and we should
accept them as their own identity.
In March 2016, he sought advice from a lawyer about what sort
of case might be built on behalf of the women in his care.
Professor Sands is a barrister who's spent 25 years working on crimes
against humanity and genocide.
He asked if he could interview any of Dr Kizilhan's patients.
I wanted to know whether the evidence they might give
was the kind of evidence that could stand up in court.
So you're looking to see their attention to detail,
the clarity of their memory, the extent to which they're
certain or uncertain.
The question you're really asking yourself is if they were subject to
a vigorous cross-examination, would it withstand that type of attack?
If I can just begin by...
If she could tell us her name, and her age.
They were able to identify locations and places and people and time,
which is all material that is enormously helpful to a prosecutor
in deciding whether to bring a case.
Where does Shirin get the strength to tell this story?
HE TRANSLATES THE QUESTION
I mean, nothing beats looking someone in the face who tells
you what has happened to them, and this was on a totally different
scale from anything that I'd heard.
THEY SPEAK IN THEIR LANGUAGE
Is she OK? Mm.
What about the punishment of the people who've treated her
in the way they have?
I left wanting to help them.
And if I, through the law, could contribute, I was going to do that,
and if that meant proving that genocide had happened,
I was going to do that.
Throughout 2016, Dr Kizilhan and his team kept track of every
woman's recovery on a case-by-case basis.
When the time was right, his patients moved to new homes
throughout the state of Baden-Wurttemberg.
The most important thing is how we can integrate them
in the German society.
If you located 1,000 persons in one area,
in one huge hospital, what will happen is they will talk
Kurdish, they will keep their own values,
old values, they will have no contact with the German society,
so we will have a ghettoisation, and we don't want that.
Hello. Hello.
THEY SPEAK IN THEIR LANGUAGE
SPEAKS IN GERMAN
OK! Tschuss! Auf wiedersehen! Ciao!
The International Criminal Court in The Hague has the jurisdiction
to prosecute individuals for war crimes, crimes
against humanity and genocide.
I've worked at the International Criminal Court for many years,
and I went to The Hague, and met in particular with one prosecutor
and said, "Look, I've met a couple of really interesting people,
"I'm interested in assessing the credibility, the weight,
"the authoritativeness of what it is they're saying."
And it was very clear the moment he started watching,
these were credible, reliable witnesses.
I mean, on a human level, I mean, this is very...
It's very moving, and a very painful statement.
And then the different acts that have been committed,
I mean, it could very well constitute offences
under the statute, and rape is the most obvious one,
but there is also sexual slavery, there is also forced pregnancy,
there is a number of other things.
Sexual slavery falls within that jurisdiction. Yes, definitely.
As a crime against humanity.
She has the name, she has the location,
she has the nationalities. Yeah, exactly.
She recalls the facts very well, she is able to tell her story
in a very clear and structured manner.
She is very specific in her recollection,
and if she knows names and nationality, locations...
I mean, these are factual information
that are critically important for any investigation.
Fallujah, finally cleared of Islamic State militants,
and the general commanding the operation has declared
the battle over.
During 2016, defeated IS fighters began to be brought
before Iraqi courts.
But their trials did not meet international standards.
Cases last ten, 12, 15 minutes.
Stories emerge vaguely, and then the defendants are executed.
Does that help over the long run?
I don't think it probably does.
What matters is a record before a responsible court.
So, I would say, you want these cases to be judged
before an International Criminal Court, because it will send a signal
to the world that a serious act of wrongdoing has occurred,
whether it's a crime against humanity, whether it's a genocide.
And I do think that just lining them up and shooting them
is not good enough.
The Commission for International Justice and Accountability,
or CIJA, gathers evidence of the kind that does support trials
of international standard.
But assembling that evidence in a war zone isn't easy.
It is risk-taking, but any type of work in a conflict zone is risky.
As human beings, we are drawn to victims' stories.
And we are, most of us, designed to feel compassion and understand
the pain of the loss or the suffering they have gone through.
But in the court of law, that will only take you so far.
And this is why what we call linkage evidence is so important.
You need to build these links from the highest level to the people
around him to the mid-ranking to your lowest level,
direct perpetrators who may have shot or sniped or raped somebody.
Without it, we would only be stuck with
prosecuting the direct perpetrators.
But what we saw, in Iraq was something quite unprecedented.
The crimes of such gravity that international criminal law
needs to be upheld.
Not only for the better future of the community affected
by that war, but for the better future of us all.
As the defeat of IS continued in 2017, it became clear
that there was little public support for a big international trial.
In relation to things like Isis and other atrocities
in various parts of the world, there is a growing demand
for summary justice.
I mean, we see it with the British members of Isis
who happen to be caught.
When it's debated in the British papers, there is a large number
of people who simply say, "What's the point of putting them on trial?
"Let's just kill them."
This is LBC.
Leading Britain's conversation, with Shelagh Fogarty.
If you've got thousands and thousands, hundreds of thousands,
to put them on trial, and then it'll cost even more
thousands and thousands to give them a cushy cell for the next 15 years.
Then they'll probably be set free.
An assessment of the facts at least is vital,
isn't it, before we start putting bullets in people's heads
in the sands of Syria?
We are no longer in the position to be that soft touch.
We have to take a stand.
I would personally torture them.
I would get as much information as we possibly can
to infiltrate their groups that are either here or trying
to come here, and personally I would sling them from the rope.
Here in the studio is Philippe Sands QC, Professor of Law
at University College London.
And Melanie Phillips, the columnist at The Times.
Melanie, kick us off here. What should happen to them?
What should we do about them?
We are bombing these people for good reason,
because they are... It's not possible to do it in any other way.
What is your problem with that, Philippe?
My problem with that is, where do you draw the line?
Do we open the door to a policy of executing our own nationals?
No, the issue is, do you open the door to laying this country
wide open to people being murdered because you are standing on some
abstract legal principle?
If terrible atrocities happen and you just move to a simple
arrangement of summary justice, the facts get forgotten
with the passage of time.
And I think people like Lewiza and Shirin are entitled
to have what was done to them known widely.
What's interesting is that Germany has decided to investigate
the crimes of Isis, Daesh, and to apply to those crimes
the rules of international criminal law.
Back in 1945, the Germans were in the dock.
Today, the Germans are taking a leadership role.
By the spring of 2017, Shirin no longer needed treatment
at Dr Kizilhan's clinic.
Instead, she saw a therapist in the small town where she'd settled.
She learned in Germany, as a woman and
as an individual, get respect from other people.
They recognise there is no reason to be ashamed,
and this gives her the confidence and the power to speak about it.
And this character, this personality is also a person who likes to fight.
And she finds a way to cope with this trauma,
to talk openly about this and be the voice
of her own people.
Lewiza is different.
Lewiza's maybe most important point
to change in a positive way was the fate of her family.
And this was very important for her to accept.
Now, I'm now in Germany, my family is free,
my mother, my brothers are free.
They are in bad conditions, but they are living.
We could see this girl who was fear, anxiety,
has grown up like a flower.
She started laughing, smiling, get in contact with people,
have friends now.
She's now really a different person.
In June 2017, Dalal suddenly decided to return home to Iraq.
Dalal's father had been working away from home when IS arrived.
He was waiting at the airport to welcome her, with other surviving
members of her close family, whom Dalal had not seen
for nearly three years.
Since she left Iraq, with so many Yazidi towns
and villages destroyed by IS, refugee camps like Shekhan had begun
to feel like long-term residences.
TRADITIONAL MUSIC
THEY SPEAK IN THEIR LANGUAGE
SHE SCREAMS AND CRIES
SHE SOBS
HE SIGHS
SHE CRIES AND SHOUTS IN HER LANGUAGE
Still now we don't know what will happen in the future
with the Yazidis.
I'm not sure if they will be able to cope
with this catastrophe.
If not, I believe they will not exist in three,
four, five generations anymore.
And this is one of the oldest cultures in the Middle East,
which goes back 4,000 years.
So we are maybe witnessing now the end of a small ethnic group.
The second option, it's possible that they are learning
from this genocide, from this catastrophe.
And through this trauma they can change the rules, and change some
of the old behaviours, cultures and traditions
and have a better future, maybe?
Because you know, Yazidis, especially the women,
was very confused regarding their identity.
They were raped by the IS, and they believed because of the rape
they are not Yazidi any more.
Before returning to Germany, Dalal visited the High Priest in Lalish
to receive his blessing.
This is the first time in the Yazidi history a High Priest stands
up and says, yes, we will change these rules.
And that, for Yazidis, is a revolution.
This genocide, how cruel it is.
It's a huge chance by the Yazidi community to define themselves
in a new way.
And this way maybe hopefully is democratic,
is progressive, and they will be able to survive,
not just in Kurdistan, they will survive in the whole world.
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