‘Calling ISIL Atrocities Against the Yezidis by Their Rightful Name’: Do They Constitute the Crime of Genocide?

ABSTRACT In March 2016, both the United States House of Representatives and Secretary of State John Kerry designated the alleged crimes committed by Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) against, inter alia, the Yezidis, a small religious minority in Iraq and Syria, as ‘genocide’. This article examines the evidence for this designation, as it emerges from various human rights reports and other publicly available sources, in order to assess whether ISIL’s actions against the Yezidis may be characterized in law as the crime of genocide. The article finds that, while ISIL’s actions against the Yezidis in Iraq and Syria may constitute the underlying acts of the crime of genocide, on the basis of information currently available in the public domain it is not possible to reach a view on whether individual perpetrators had the dolus specialis necessary to commit the crime of genocide. The article, however, does identify a pattern of conduct which arguably constitutes a genocidal plan undertaken by ISIL.