On March 16, 2021, CEP hosted a launch event for the new report, "Western Foreign Fighters and the Yazidi Genocide".

As Western states face an ongoing dilemma over the fate of their stranded and captured “foreign fighters”, award-winning historian and author, Tom Holland, and President of YAZDA, Haider Elias, joined CEP to discuss the role of foreign fighters in the Yazidi genocide and the search for justice.

In August 2014, ISIS launched an assault on Sinjar, home to Iraq’s vulnerable Yazidi religious minority. More than 3,000 Yazidis are thought to have been killed in the initial assault, many in mass executions, with almost 7,000 Yazidi women and children kidnapped and enslaved throughout ISIS’s so-called caliphate.

So far, justice for these crimes has not been delivered. This discussion aims to highlight Yazidi survivors’ ongoing fight for justice and the underexplored role of Westerners in the atrocities. 

Speakers:
-Tom Holland, award-winning historian, author, and broadcaster
-Haider Elias, president, YAZDA, the leading Yazidi human rights NGO
-Liam Duffy, London-based CEP strategic advisor, author of CEP’s latest report: Western Foreign Fighters and the Yazidi Genocide

Moderated by: 
-Lucinda Creighton, CEP senior advisor in Europe, former Irish Minister of State for European Affairs

Download the report here: https://bit.ly/3rTc4oH