An evil not seen since the Nazis is carrying out a medieval genocide in the Middle East until modern technology and American representative democracy comes to the rescue
Now That Should Be A Movie
Short Pitch
It is called Sinjar.
It is a survival drama.
In the vein of Defiance.
It is like 13 Hours meets Dunkirk.
It follows poor Yazidi widow Alifa Murad living in Iraq
And young professional reporter Dakhil Shammo living in America.
As they try to survive and alert the world of the genocide being carried out against the Yazidi by ISIS.
Problems arise when the Yazidi people are trapped on Mount Sinjar without food and water and the world does not seem to pay any attention to the unfolding crime against humanity.
Together they will survive and work with government agencies until the American military and its allies come to the rescue.
The idea came to me when I was thinking about great moments of humanitarianism in American history and vaguely remembered something about a rescue in northern Iraq in 2014.
My unique approach would be the juxtaposition and cognitive dissonance of representative democracy and comfort and security in America and Europe as modern forms of communication alert people to the medieval holocaust unfolding against the Yazidis in the harsh environment of Mount Sinjar.
A set piece would be when Alifa realizes that her newborn granddaughter is no longer with her group making its way across Sinjar. When her son explains that he left the baby to die, she sits down and screams. She screams until her son goes back and picks up the baby and gives it to her. Alifa carries the baby under the burning sun until she can no longer walk herself. She sits down and the group continues, leaving her to die. Then she looks up and sees American planes flying overhead. A second later they drop bombs on ISIS positions. A moment later Kurdish militia allied with the US appear. They give Alifa and her granddaughter lifesaving water in the nick of time.
Target audiences would be men and women, twenty to fifty years old, social and humanitarian workers, military buffs and history nerds.
Audiences would want to see the movie due to the themes of courage, endurance, compassion and humanitarianism, and a positive portrayal of the US military.
Today’s book that should be a movie is Sinjar: 14 Days that Saved the Yazidis from Islamic State by Susan Shand, from Lyons Press.
Alifa Murad, a fifty-year old widow, lives in the tiny farming village of Wardiyeh in the foothills of Mount Sinjar in northern Iraq where she was born and raised among her fellow Yazidis. Each day she wears the same traditional long white dress of the Yazidi women. She lives with her son Daoud, pregnant daughter-in-law Nadira, and four-year old grandson.
Dakhil Shammo, a former translator for the US Army in Iraq and naturalized citizen of the US, lives in northern Virginia where he works as a journalist for the radio station Voice of America. At VOA he writes and produces a news show in Kurdish. His family fled to the US in the mid-1990s due to the Kurdish Civil War.
The Yazidi are a 1 million strong ethnoreligious group and religious sub-group of the Kurds who have inhabited the Kurdistan region of the Middle East for nearly a millennium. They have faced persecution for most of their existence, including being the target of the second deadliest terrorist attack since 9/11, and fourth deadliest attack in history. On August 14, 2007, four coordinated car bombings in the Yazidi city of Til Ezer killed nearly 800 people. Yet when the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, Islamic State of Iraq and Syria – ISIS – took over Mosul in June of 2014, the Yazidis felt safe despite less than 100 miles of desert separating them. Many believed that their area had little strategic value for ISIS, whose eye was probably on Bagdad. Besides, 18,000 of the Kurdish branch of the Iraqi Armed Forces, the Peshmerga, guarded the area.
But then the Peshmerga abandoned the area on the night of August 2, 2014 in the “Great Betrayal.” Did they want the Yazidi massacred? Were they using the Yazidi as pawns in an attempt to convince the US they needed more weapons? Or did they simply run out of ammunition? The debate continues to this day.
On the Morning of August 3, the ISIS onslaught against the Yazidi people began. Survivors recall being awakened by artillery fire at 2:00 AM. By 6:00 AM the ground attack had begun. Militias and a few remaining Peshmerga units fought back. At the town of Ger Zerik they destroyed the first column of ISIS fighters. But by 8:00 AM these shows of resistance were quickly overwhelmed by the heavy artillery and weapons America had left to the Iraqi Army and ISIS had captured in Mosul.
As resistance fell before the ISIS attack, civilians began fleeing. Yazidis used their cellphones to alert other villages of the collapse. Because of a holiday the previous day, many Yazidi were sleeping in at the homes of friends and relatives and were without their own vehicles. The ISIS attacks were so sudden that many refugees, mainly women and children, fled with only their sandals and the clothes on their backs. Without water, hundreds died of dehydration. In two hundred minutes half a million people had fled on both foot and in vehicles, creating a dust storm over the plain.
The elderly who could not or would not flee were massacred. At Ger Zerik alone seven hundred were massacred and buried in a mass grave at the center of town. The civilians fleeing on foot were hunted down by ISIS fighters in trucks. The ISIS militants corralled the Yazidi like cattle, using their trucks to prod them. They set up checkpoints on the roads, stopping the Yazidi at checkpoints.
At the checkpoints the ISIS fighters separated males and females with the exception of boys who appeared to be under ten. After the women and children were marched off, the men were given the ultimatum to convert to Islam or die. Men who converted were forced into performing manual labor. But most of them refused. They were lined up and executed by automatic fire to the back of their heads. A few were beheaded. The women and children were taken deep into ISIS controlled territory. Married women were separated from the unmarried. Girls over eight were placed with the unmarried. Elderly women were murdered. The boys were taken to be trained as child soldiers. Infants and young children died from lack of nourishment. The unmarried women were registered. Female doctors checked to see which ones were virgins. Then ISIS fighters were allowed to choose their sex slaves.
Added to the trauma was the betrayal of neighbors and supposed friends. Saddam Hussein had moved Sunni Muslims to the area in the 1970s, giving them Yazidi land in order to exercise greater control over the area in a process known as Arabization. The Yazidis had tried to break through the resultant ethnic tenson by giving non-Yazidis the honor of being their children’s Kreefs, or godfathers. As the children’s godfathers, the Kreefs attended celebrations and ceremonies and were welcomed into Yazidi homes. And for a few decades it had worked as Yazidi and Arab worked side by side in the fields and bartered in the marketplaces.
But all that came collapsing down as ISIS took over the region. Many of the ISIS fighters were from Europe and Central Asia, so they had to rely on local neighbors and friends of the Yazidi as translators. Arabs pointed out the homes of the rich and influential Yazidi, marking them for bulldozing. At one hospital Arab doctors escorted the ISIS fighters through the wards, pointing out the Yazidi and Christians which ISIS then murdered in their beds. Kreefs were allowed to take their goddaughters as sex slaves.
As in every dark moment in history, there are a few shining lights of humanity. The poor village of Bashuk was split between Yazidis and Sunni non-Arab Muslims known as Mandikans. When word of the advance ISIS reached the village, all the Yazidi fled to Sinjar, except for the sick and elderly. The Mandikans chose to hide the remaining Yazidi. When ISIS forces arrived and asked their fellow Muslims if they wanted to work together, the Mandikans refused. All but a few ISIS fighters left the village. The Mandikans spent the next eight days hiding the Yazidis before they could smuggle them out to Sinjar. Then the Mandikans themselves fled.
At the village of Wardiyeh, Alifa had arisen early to make bread. She looked out on the plain and saw a group of people heading toward the village. Many of them were children, their heads down. Behind this first group of people came a much larger wave of humanity. By 8:00 AM thousands of Yazidis had flowed into the village.
Alifa called Daoud to meet the refugees. They told him shocking tales of brutality and murder. They had seen loved ones killed and daughters kidnapped by ISIS. The refugees urged Alifa and her family to flee. At first Daoud was worried if Nadira could walk the two miles to Sinjar let alone climb it in her pregnant condition. But at the urging of Nadira’s mother, Daoud and the rest of Alifa’s family headed to the mountain.
Around 50,000 of the fleeing Yazidi people found refuge on Sinjar, a nearly seventy-mile-long mountain range that rises 4,500 feet out of the alluvial steppe plains of Northwestern Iraq. Erosion has formed valleys with inward facing cliffs within the mountain. Arid and barren, it is devoid of most plant life, water, or shade. Yet it is considered sacred by the Yazidis and would be the salvation for many of them in the late summer of 2014.
Once they reached Sinjar, few Yazidis had food or water. What amounts they had were small. Temperatures on Mount Sinjar rose to 120 during the day and dropped into the lower 50s during the night. The sun burned their faces and ears until their skin split. Fathers administered drops of water to their wives and children every few hours. Many simply laid on the burning rocks, saving their strength for breathing. Hundreds died of dehydration and exhaustion. Some people ate the leaves of bushes, causing allergic reactions. Wild goats were caught by fathers and milked by mothers who caught the milk with cupped hands, dripping drops into their children’s mouths.
Refugees with cars drove a switchback road as far as possible up the mountain. 50 Yazidi men remained to cover the escape. From their position further up the mountain other refugees watched as the men were executed by ISIS fighters. The terrorists never attempted to drive up the mountain. Instead, they guarded it, refusing to let anyone go come or come down. They were going to starve the Yazidis to death.
Few men had weapons, but everyone had cell phones. Many Yazidis communicated with WhatsApp, a free smartphone app that could use mobile data to send voice calls and text messages. They began contacting their friends and family living abroad. When their phone batteries died, the men bravely snuck down to their cars below at night to charge them.
Day was dawning several hours later in America when Dakhil’s son woke him with information he had seen on Facebook regarding the attack. Dakhil and the rest of the family quickly began calling their family members. The relatives informed him that the Peshmerga stationed in the area had retreated the night before. Dakhil as able to reach his brother who had fled but was stuck in a traffic jam of other refugees. The brother had not been able to get ahold of their mother. Dakhil called his mother and convinced her to escape to Sinjar. Then for the next few hours the cell towers in the region were overloaded as relatives tried to contact their relatives.
Through his work with VOA Dakhil had contentions with Douglas Padgett and Leanne Cannon of the Office of International Religious Freedom (IRF). The IRF office occupied a small cubbyhole on the third floor of the vast State Department building on C Street. Padgett and Cannon’s staff consisted of about thirteen, including interns. On Sunday night, they each received an email from Dakhil with the header “urgent, massacre.”
Padgett and Cannon met the morning of August 4 at the office to discuss Dakhil’s email. Their office received many complaints about religious persecution, but Dakhil’s email stood out as the most urgent. But the Obama Administration was busy hosting the United States–Africa Leaders Summit at the White House. The summit had the city on lockdown. Due to road closers, government employees were encouraged to stay home and telework. Yet Padgettt and Cannon knew they needed to have an in-person meeting with Dakhil.
At 3:00 PM Dakhil and twelve other Yazidis made it through the traffic jams and met the IRF at the State Department building. He relayed the information he had received from relatives and friends on the ground in Iraq. A humanitarian crisis was unfolding as 200,000 Yazidi were believed to be heading toward Sinjar. Children were dying of dehydration. With this information in hand, Padgett and Cannon met with the State Department to urge them to pressure the Iraqi and autonomous Kurdistan regional governments to offer aid to the Yazidi refugees. It was believed that if they did not respond within a week, all the Yazidi would be dead.
Dakhil was not the only Yazidi working within the American system for his people’s good. Many of the Yazidis living in America were men who had been translators for the US military during its occupation of Iraq. They now considered themselves Americans and were doing their civic duty for both their old country and their new country. Haider Elias founded the Sinjar Crisis Management Team. Hadi Pir led a caravan of cars from Houston, Texas, to Washington D. C. In Lincoln, Nebraska, protesters gathered outside the Governor’s Mansion. “Help us,” “They are killing us” they shouted. The police were sympathetic, but the protesters needed a permit. The next day the protesters returned, and the police escorted them into the mansion. They had an emergency meeting with Congressman Jeff Fortenberry. The meeting resulted in Fortenberry drafting a letter to President Obama urging him to act on behalf of the Yazidi. For many Yazidis this was their first experience with representative democracy.
Meanwhile Alifa and her family had been on the mountain for three days when she received a call from her brother who had remained in the village. If you don’t come back, they’ll kill us, he said. There had been no violence so far, he explained. The strong ties of family pulled Alifa and her family back to the village on Wednesday, August 6.
In the village they had access to television. On the screen they saw that the massacres they had only heard about were reality. Realizing the mistake they had made in returning to the village, they left at three in the morning on Thursday. They wore black and used no flashlights, making it back to the mountain just at dawn.
They had no food and only a few sips of water for each family member. The women tore pieces of cotton from their long skirts and wrapped them around their children’s faces to prevent sunburn. Then Alifa’s daughter-in-law Nadira went into labor.
Now would be a good time to introduce a character pivotal to the Yazidi story: Vian Dakhil, the forty-three-year-old female representative of the Yazidi in the Iraqi Parliament
A dramatic set piece would be when on Tuesday, August 5th, she rose among lackadaisical politicians in Bagdad. Like so many other Yazidis, she had been awakened Sunday morning by several calls from relatives informing her of the massacre. When the speaker of the house called the meeting to order, he gave her the floor. As Vian approached the floor, she realized she had forgotten her speech in her chair, but that didn’t stop her. Surrounded by fifty supporters, who had their backs turned toward her, a sign of respect in their culture, she began.
“In the name of Allah, the Merciful, the compassionate, honorable Presidential Council, colleagues, representatives of the Iraqi people,” her shrill voice arose above the mumble of the male lawmakers. Some of the lawmakers continued to mill about, but several stood at attention before their chairs. They tried to shush the other lawmakers. “I’m standing here not in order to deliver a speech to the Iraqi people,” she continued in a quavering voice. “But in order to convey the bitter reality of the Yazidis currently on Mount Sinjar. Mr. Speaker, we are being slaughtered under the name banner of ‘There is no god but Allah.’” She looked around the room with tear-filled eyes. The chamber was quiet. “Over the course of forty-hours, thirty thousand families are stranded in the Sinjar Mountains with no water and food. They are dying – seventy kids so far have died from thirst and suffocation. Brothers, let’s put our political differences aside and work together as human beings.”
The speaker of the parliament tried to silence her, reminding her that she was not sticking to her scripted statement. “This is my statement,” she screeched, holding her hand high. “They are dying. Seventy babies have died so far from thirst and dehydration. Fifty old people have died from the deteriorating conditions. Our women are taken as slaves and sold in the slave market.”
“Mr. Speaker,” She continued, her voice trembling with passion. “We demand that the Iraqi Parliament intervene immediately to stop this massacre. We are being slaughtered. We are being exterminated. An entire religion is being exterminated from the face of the earth. Brothers I appeal you in the name of humanity to save us! Mr. Speaker…”
Before she could finish, she collapsed to the ground. The other parliamentarians rushed forward and caught her. After regaining her strength, she went to the press room. At the time she did not realize the effectiveness of the speech. For the first time in its history, the Iraqi Parliament came to an agreement, voting to send humanitarian air drops over Sinjar and carrying out airstrikes on ISIS positions in the area. The video recording of Vian’s speech was picked up by the Associated Press TV and Reuters TV. Soon other news channels were running the video. The speech was the headliner for most news broadcasts that evening. It was soon appearing in newspapers and spreading across social media. But more importantly, the speech made its way to the Oval Office.
Vian would visit Sinjar in person a few days later via helicopter. She was nearly killed when refugees rushing to get aboard the craft caused it to crash. The recognition for her efforts includes Woman of the Year by Iraqi Women’s Network, Bruno Krensky Prize for Service to Human Right, the Geneva Prize for Human Rights, Lantos Human Rights Prize, the 2014 Anna Politkovskaya Award. And top of the list of women that ISIS wanted dead.
On Thursday, August 7, demonstrators appeared outside the White House, waving signs that read “Save Us” and “Stop ISIS.” Older women wore the Yazidi traditional white headscarves and long colorful skirts. Men arranged themselves in a circle on the ground to represent the dead. The group began to chant “Stop The Genocide.” Dakhil Shammo and his cameraman went among the chanting Yazidis, interviewing them. He then returned to his office and arranged the interviews and images. After a few hours, his two-minute report was on the air in Kurdistan. Then he wept.
On Mount Sinjar Alifa welcomed a new granddaughter into the harsh environment of the world. Daoud took off his t-shirt and used it to wipe the blood and embryonic fluid from his daughter’s eyes and nose. He made sure she could breathe by putting his finger into her mouth. A stranger lent them a small, dull knife to cut the cord. With no rags to wipe the rest of the blood and goop off, it dried on the infant’s body. After a few days it formed a crust that began to flake off. Both blood-covered mother and daughter seat exhausted in the sun as though waiting for death.
In Washington DC, the IRF contacted an army colonel, Charles Freeman, stationed at the US consulate in Erbil, the capital of Kurdistan. He had been warned by the employees of the State Department that the IRF was too idealistic to be taken seriously. But Cannon was able to connect with him since they were both alumni, though years apart, of Abilene Christian University. Freeman began assessing the situation on the ground and contacted officials in Washington. With The African Summit over, the Obama presidency was able to turn its attention on the situation unfolding at Sinjar. On Thursday morning Padgett arrived at the White House to attend an Interagency Policy Meeting discussing the humanitarian need in northern Iraq. The meeting was attended by several national security advisors. Much of the discussion centered on the varying estimates of the number of Yazidis on Sinjar, which ranged from two hundred thousand to thirty thousand and dropping. There was discussion about whether Peshmerga units or other American allies where in the area. Then the meeting was dismissed. Dakhil and other Yazidi were meeting with President Obama about the same time. Several hours after Padgett’s meeting, he received a text message regarding a rescue mission. “It was a go.”
On August 7th, four days after the massacre had begun, two F/A-18s took off from the Carrier George H. W. Bush in the Persian Gulf. They were escorting one C-17 and two C-130s carrying emergency supplies to airdrop to desperate Yazidis on Mount Sinjar. The aircraft dropped seventy-two pallets containing fifty-three hundred gallons of fresh drinking water and eight thousand MREs down to the stranded Yazidi. Mothers dug into the food with their nails, then put their fingers into their babies’ mouths.
At 9:30 PM East Coast Time in the US, President Obama addressed the nation, announcing that he had ordered airstrikes to protect the American consul at Erbil and humanitarian operations to aid the Yazidis. The first American air strikes occurred Friday. Two f/A-18 Hornet Fighters dropped five-hundred-pound bombs on ISIS convoys. Dakhil Shammo immediately called his mother. “The Americans are going to save us.”
On Mount Sinjar, Daoud listened to the sound of airstrikes for two days, assuming it was ISIS bombing Yazidis. He believed his family would be safer if they moved north toward the Syrian border. Then he and Nadira made the gut-wrenching decision to leave their daughter behind. Nadira was too exhausted to carry her and Daoud believed she would die anyway. He laid her under the shade of a bush. Maybe someone who could take care of her would find her.
The family had no sooner started their journey than Alifa stopped. She demanded to know what happened to the baby. Was she dead? Daoud said she soon would be. Alifa seat down and refused to move unless they brought the baby. She screamed in anguish until finally Daoud went and retrieved his daughter. Alifa grabbed her granddaughter from him and began walking.
The sun was beating down as the group slowly progressed. Nadira collapsed. Daoud lifted her over his shoulder, allowing her arms and head to hang down his back. Then Alifa seat down with the baby in her arms. She could go no farther. No one had the strength to argue with her or even cry. They just kept on walking, leaving the young and old to die together.
Then a military truck appeared. The armed men were not dressed in black like ISIS fighters. Instead, they wore the khaki pants and camo green of the YPG, the People’s Defense Units. The YPG was a Kurdish militia group that had been fighting ISIS in Syria since 2013.
The YPG gave the family water, helped them into their truck and then drove to where Alifa was sitting with the baby. They helped her up and took the baby, giving her water and mashed fruit. They then transported the family across the border into Syria where a nurse rushed the granddaughter to a clinic. She was released a few days later with a clean bill of health.
The Murads were just a few of the estimated 100,000 Yazidis that the YPG saved through coordinated efforts with the Red Cross and the US military. With the help of US airstrikes, a mile-wide corridor was opened from the YPG camp in Syria across the Iraqi border to Sinjar. The YPG fighters dug defense positions on both sides of the passageway. Then they made their way up the mountain, greeting the Yazidi with food, water and medicine. They then escorted them off Sinjar, carrying some on their backs down the mountain side. They were then transported to the refugee camps where doctors and nurses treated the refugees for a number of conditions, including allergic reactions to the leaves some had eaten. The YPG kept the corridor open from August 9 to the 16th. Around thirty would lay down their lives so that tens of thousands of Yazidis could escape.
Under the cover of the American airstrikes, the Peshmerga was able to regroup and for three days force ISIS back across the river. US C-130s dropped crates of weapons and ammunition to them. The Peshmerga pushed the terrorists away from the southern permitter of Sinjar, breaking the siege of the mountain. The British and French also joined in the humanitarian operations. 114,000 meals and more than 35,000 gallons of water would be dropped on Sinjar.
Tuesday, August 12, after five days of air strikes, the US sent a 130-member military assessment team. This included 15 members of Delta Force, the 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta. When the Delta Force commandos arrived on Sinjar, they found only four to five thousand refugees remained, mainly armed Yazidis who lived on the mountain. They met with British SAS soldiers who were also in the area. After exchanging notes, they decided that an evacuation operation was not necessary after the air strikes had allowed tens of thousands of Yazidis to escape. Seven days after Vian Dakhil’s speech in the Iraqi Parliament, the last large group of refugees were brought down from the mountain.
Dakhil Shammo continues to work for Voice of America. His work with IRF is the basis for studies regarding the massacre of the Yazidis. With 5,000 dead and 10,000 enslaved by ISIS, the United Nations made their first genocide charge of the twenty-first century. Alifa and her family were among the 500,000 Yazidi displaced. Like many other Yazidi, they named their daughter Vian in honor of Vian Dakhil.
The rescue at Sinjar was but a blip on the American news. Social media was full of pictures and videos of the Ice Bucket Challenge and discussions of keeping Ebola out of the United States. The suicide of the actor Robin William and subsequent controversial comments by Rush Limbaugh were trending on Twitter. On August 9th as the siege was being broken, a young African American male named Michael Brown was shot dead by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. His death and ensuing riots quickly took over the headlines. While Brown’s death jumpstarted the Black Lives Matter movement, there was no Yazidi Lives Matter movement. While Brown’s death inspired the slogan “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot,” there is no phrase from the Yazidi Genocide that has entered the lexicon of the American conscience. Despite President Obama’s DOJ fining that Brown’s death was justified, when people argue that genocide is being carried out against African Americans in the streets of the United States at the hands of police, they point to Mr. Brown’s death as an example rather than look at how the genocide of 5,000 Yazidi was carried out at the hands of ISIS.
The genocide of the Yazidi is a reminder that crimes against humanity like the Holocaust can easily happen again if the world is not watching. Two years before the rescue at Sinjar, President Barack Obama stood beside Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel as he announced the creation Atrocity Prevention Board (APB). “We are haunted by the atrocities we did not stop,” the president said, echoing the sentiment “Never Again.” But without a budget the APB was nonessential, meeting every month to share information and take notes. During the rescue of the Yazidi at Sinjar the board came into its own as it worked in coordination with the IRF. It was proof that “Never Again” can be a reality when the world pays attention.
Yet in less than 10 years it seems that the massacre of the Yazidi Genocide has already been forgotten. Shand’s book is just about the only one on the subject and I had to request it at my local Barnes and Noble. There have been no appearances on Oprah. No New York Times Bestsellers. Even with George Clooney’s wife Amal working with 2018 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Nadia Murad there have been no Oscar nominated movie or documents. There has been one independent film called To Be A Soldier that takes place in the area around the same time and one French film, Girls of the Sun, in which the rescue at Sinjar is mentioned in the opening credits. The one song I have been able to find was by a no-name artis. It has the line “This is not a war / This is just evil / Why does the world ignore / those poor Yazidi people?”
The story of the rescue has several themes that audiences like to see in movies. Bravery. Courage in the face of evil. Humanity. Compassion. Endurance. Hope. The scenes of American planes flying down out of the sky as Yazidi people watch, ready to run through the corridor to safety, is just as powerful as any scene featuring an asteroid or spaceship being blown up seconds before it hits earth. With Top Gun: Maverick topping $1 billion at the box office, audiences have shown they will turnout for movies that positively and respectfully portray our military. And what better way to portray our military than showing them saving lives? If filmmakers can make a mission in take out a nuclear plant exciting, then it can do the same for a mission to save women and children. But also there should be a movie so that the Yazidi victims will be remembered so that no other group suffers the fate of genocide. And more importantly, to honor the Yazidi who survived and have endured.
In order to remind the world that genocides can be prevented and to honor the Yazidi people and their lost loved ones is why Sinjar by Susan Shand Should Be A Movie.
