Natia Navrouzov on documenting to prosecuting the Yazidi genocide

Very naturally, but now looking back also a bit naively, we thought that the international community would react to ISIS crimes and create an international or hybrid tribunal the same way it was done for other contexts like Rwanda, or the former Yugoslavia. We had that belief because ISIS is not just one entity with people from one nationality. It is actually over 80 nationalities, so it is an international issue.

Natia Navrouzov is an international lawyer and the Executive Director of Yazda, an institution that protects and champions religious and ethnic minority communities. Yazda was founded in 2014 at the onset of the genocide perpetrated by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) against the Yazidis, as well as war crimes and crimes against humanity against other minorities.

In this interview, Natia examines how Yezidi survivors and NGOs began collecting testimonies, locating mass graves, and compiling evidence in the aftermath of Daesh’s genocidal campaign. The interview highlights how these efforts – driven by survivors themselves – laid the groundwork for international recognition of the Yezidi genocide and informed future legal action.

The interview as conducted by Léa Franchisteguy, Justine Lager, Tacéo Lenfant et Louisa Ustachakowski.

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The interview was conducted in May 2025 and has been edited for clarity.

How does Yazda approach the documentation of the Yazidi genocide and the collection of evidence of crimes committed by Daesh, especially considering their gravity and their extent? What types of evidence are typically gathered and to what extent do victims participate in this process?

When we started Yazda, shortly after the genocide, our main focus at the time was to just help people who were fleeing, who were in need of very urgent humanitarian support. And a few months after the start of the genocide, a few survivors started to escape from captivity, so they started to come back to the Kurdistan region where we had also established our offices.

They were coming to us very naturally because Yazda was founded by Yazidis so it is a very community-led NGO, so there was an initial trust. They were coming to us and then we realized most of them also wanted to speak, they wanted to share what they had experienced in captivity. We became a natural space for them to tell their stories.

Around the same time, the Yazidi village’s leader, the Baba Sheikh, which is the equivalent of a Yazidi pope, made a declaration and said that survivors were coming back from captivity, were welcomed back to the community, including the ones who were forcibly converted and subjected to sexual violence. That is a very essential statement. In many different contexts, even in the context of ISIS, a lot of survivors are stigmatized, are not able to speak about what had happened to them. This simple ground-breaking declaration [of the Baba Sheik] really opened the space for voices of survivors to tell their stories. And we started this documentation project.

In parallel, we started very important advocacy work. Survivors also publicly spoke of what has had happened to them. I think without that, the Yazidi genocide could have been just an internal issue and not an international recognized genocide.

In terms of our documentation work we started to record survivors’ testimonies, and they have always been in the center of our process. We also acknowledge that it is a very, very difficult process. Not everyone can interview survivors, so we always made sure our teams were trained and received capacity building themselves. A lot of our staff are Yazidi, so there is also the risk of secondary trauma for the staff – about which we don’t talk about enough.

As areas were liberated, especially Sinjar, our staff went there and also documented crime scenes – this is the second type of evidence we are collecting, in addition to the testimonies. Sinjar was basically full of mass graves, because when ISIS came, they killed the men and anyone who was not deemed to be enslaved, including elderly women. That left behind dozens and dozens of mass graves. We documented almost 100 of them. We have been sharing those with the authorities for them to exhume. Exhumation process is also an important part of our work.

The last type of evidence that we have been continuously gathering is the propaganda – ISIS was very vocal about the crimes they were committing including writing about it, showing videos, this terror ideology that they had and still have to this date. We also documented that. When we interview survivors, we also ask them if they have any picture, video, or anything they can share with us on their time in captivity. Sometimes they do have things and we take a copy of that. This whole set of evidence is now constituting our documentation project data.

Would you say that the organization had from the beginning in mind the idea that all this evidence could then be used as evidence in court or is it something that came up later on in the process?

I think that in the very beginning we did not really think about criminal accountability or transitional justice. We were more thinking about building a historical archive of the crimes, because Yezidis have been subjected to crimes by ISIS, but also have been subjected to crimes over many generations – my family as well.

I grew up with stories of crimes that were committed against my great-grand-parents during the Armenian genocide, but if you try to find information, you just don’t find much. This was a fear from the Yazda founders that the ISIS genocide would just not be acknowledged to the extent it actually happened. Thus, the first aim was a historical record to keep the evidence, preserve it at any cost, and then later think about what to do with it.

But we quickly started to make connections, we started to work with Amal Clooney, who is an international lawyer and barrister. She pointed to the fact that this is actually evidence that could be used to prosecute ISIS members. And then we started to get attention from third states like France, Germany and others, because they started to have this issue of their nationals returning and they did not know what they had done in Syria and in Iraq. They were looking at us to help them in figuring that out.

Turning maybe to the role that the organization played in the establishment of UNITAD. How was Yazda involved in the establishment of UNITAD? And once UNITAD was set up, how did Yazda collaborate with it? And concerning the very recent closure of UNITAD – what impact will this have, especially on victims?

In addition to documenting the crimes, we started very early to do some advocacy internationally. Very naturally, but now looking back also a bit naively, we thought that the international community would react to ISIS crimes and create an international or hybrid tribunal the same way it was done for other contexts like Rwanda, or the former Yugoslavia. We had that belief because ISIS is not just one entity with people from one nationality. It is actually over 80 nationalities, so it is an international issue. ISIS has been committing crimes all over the world, including in France, in Belgium and in many European states. The scale of the crimes was just so obviously a genocide that we thought, if the international community does not set up a tribunal for this, then... But unfortunately, there was not such an appetite – we hear different reasons for that, which were mainly political.

The response to the ISIS crimes was mainly the establishment of a military coalition. The idea was to eradicate them as quickly as possible through airstrikes and military interventions, which to us to a certain extent was necessary but also does not constitute the justice survivors have been calling for.

As a sort of compromise for not establishing such a tribunal, the UN Security Council created UNITAD – which is a mechanism that was created to document and preserve the evidence of ISIS in Iraq. We were sort of happy about that. We were also always thinking this was just the first step, but it is important to document.

But for which purpose? You need to use that evidence. UNIDAD came to Iraq in late 2018 and we were one of the first NGOs they signed a memorandum of understanding with. We started to share evidence with them to advance their work and help them in their investigations, because we had already collected all that evidence. Of course, whenever sharing survivors’ testimony, and I want to always emphasize that, you need to get informed consent first. We always went back to the survivors, explaining who UNITAD was and seeing if they would agree for us to share their statement with UNITAD.

UNITAD was operating in Iraq until September last year, 2024. Then it was unfortunately shut down because UNITAD came to Iraq with the invitation of Iraq. Every year, Iraq had to renew that invitation at the Security Council. And the year before, they had said, we are renewing the mandate, but only for one more year and then UNITAD needs to close and go.

This was a shock to us and to survivors. I also want to emphasize that this news was not disclosed enough to survivors. Neither UNITAD nor Iraq really made any announcements to inform the affected communities. It all had to go through us.

The main reason Iraq closed UNITAD was they weren’t really satisfied with the work. They were saying that UNITAD is supposed to collect that evidence but also to give it to them, and Iraq would not receive anything. UNITAD’s position, as a UN entity, was to say that it could not give anything to the Iraqi government right now because they is the death penalty in Iraq. According to UN principles, with the death penalty suc information cannot be shared.

This question of the death penalty was in a way an issue for years, without it being resolved. Then UNITAD was closed, the evidence was taken to New York, and it is there right now in the UN archive. It is not accessible because it needs more resources to be accessible. It needs the creation of maybe a new mechanism, but that new mechanism would need Iraq’s approval and Iraq does not want to give that approval. Some of the evidence was given to Iraq.

My point here is that the UN created a mechanism that raised a lot of expectations from survivors, because UNITAD also actively interviewed survivors, and then it was closed without a plan. This unit was not meant to be forever, anyways, but there should have been a clear plan on how to close it in phases, and make sure that the evidence at least remains accessible. It was a very distressing period.

Right now, the only justice avenue that remains available are those universal jurisdiction cases – so this is what we are focusing on mainly.

How do you use the evidence you have gathered to pursue criminal accountability and seek justice in court?

In terms of having no international hybrid tribunal established, what we did next was to look around and see what other avenues were available, mainly before domestic courts.

In 2015, we also submitted a submission to the International Criminal Court (ICC) and asked them to open a situation on Iraq and look into ISIS crimes. At the time, we were told that there was not enough information that mid to high level perpetrators were involved, which is a criterion for the ICC. Iraq and Syria are not party to the ICC. What we were pointing to were the nationals, as many people who joined ISIS were from different countries, including from state parties to the Rome Statute.

However, the ICC concluded that there was not enough evidence. It does not mean we do not need to try again. We are also still looking into another possibility to open an ICC investigation. Also, the fact that Karim Khan, who is the current prosecutor, used to be the head UNITAD is a good link and bridge for us to be able to see if ICC would do something about that.

In terms of what else was possible, Iraq seems to be the natural place where you would want to bring cases because this is where most of the victims are. Most of the perpetrators were also from Iraq and most of the crime scenes are there.

However, Iraq right now does not criminalize genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. In Iraq, the trials are only taking place for terrorism and victims are not involved. There are also huge concerns about fair trial rights guarantees and aspects.

In that situation, our only option was to look at third states, like Germany, France, Belgium, others. They started to also show interest into bringing those cases in front of their jurisdictions because of the ISIS members who were returning. For national security, they also started to do prosecution, a lot of these cases also happened only for terrorism. But then, as more and more clarity was shed on what ISIS was also actually doing in terms of the other international crimes they were committing, some prosecutors started to also look into those crimes and Germany actually was the main one at that time, and still now, to lead the way.

Because of the situation in Germany, we started to have more and more collaboration with the German War Crimes Unit and prosecutors to be able to submit evidence to them based on individuals they were already investigating. As a matter of fact, war crimes units from different countries can submit to us requests as they are working on their investigations, because we have all that data, and we have that database. They tell us: Do you have information on Abu Hassan who used to be married to Um Miriam? Do you have anything on them? And then we look into our database, and we respond. That is one way we support those cases.

Then we ourselves also monitor the repatriation movements. Once in a while in the media, you hear that certain people were brought back from Syria or Iraq to France or Belgium or Germany. Then we reach out to the war crimes units, and we tell them we have read about this, do you need support? Do you want us to check if any of the Yazidis we have interviewed has mentioned those people in their testimonies to help you to bring charges that are not just terrorism? Because we do not want to just have half part of the reality shown [only having terrorism related charges]. This is how we have been working.

In the testimonies we collect, survivors often have no idea about the identity of their perpetrators. They do not know their names. They only know them by their war names, by their kunyas, Abu Hassan or Um something. For us, as an NGO, it is very difficult to track people, to know where they are. Are they still alive? As I said, the coalition against ISIS killed a lot of them in those airstrikes. Are they in a prison in Iraq or in Syria? This kind of information is not easily available. Are they here in Europe? Are they part of refugee waves that came here and are pretending that they are just regular people in a way? For us, it is very hard to track. We do not have the real identities most of the time. So that is why we work so closely with war crimes units and support their work.

You supported a lot of investigations and proceedings in these different jurisdictions. How would you say that victims’ rights have been taken into account into each jurisdiction, especially in France and in Germany - as these are the jurisdictions that we have talked about and that we will talk about in the podcast?

Each jurisdiction is different, even in Europe, but even more when you have common law jurisdictions. The way we approach this is that we always have those conversations with the war crimes units and the prosecutors. We ask them to explain to us what the rights and obligations of survivors would be if they participated in that particular case. Are survivors able to be anonymous? Will they need to come to the court and testify in person? How will they be updated? Will they get psychological support? Will they have witness protection?

We ask all these questions because when we go back to the survivor and ask them first of all if they are willing to share their testimony with this entity and if they want to participate in the investigation or upcoming proceedings, then we need to give them all that information so that they make an informed decision – not just a decision, but one informed by everything. We will tell them also in terms of risks.

Each jurisdiction has been different. For example, in Germany, in some cases, there was, especially in the first cases, a lot of witness protection. Then later, there was less. In France, survivors, and NGOs like Yazda are able to join as a civil party, which gives us a set of rights that we do not have in other jurisdictions.

For me, it was very interesting to learn about all of these differences. There are some good parts and weaknesses in all of these jurisdictions and it is very interesting to compare but I want to highlight the importance for the survivors of always having a trusted NGO or person as an intermediary. For us this is already a complex process to follow and know about, so imagine for the survivors who might even be more in difficulty.

How would you say that the legal characterization of the charges influenced the process of the trials for the victims? We talked about genocide charges, crimes against humanity charges. What is the difference with these different kinds of charges?

The legal characterization and indictments are brought by the prosecutors. They make a strategic decision for what they want to indict the suspects. This is something we can influence as Yazda, but not in all jurisdictions. It really depends on our role. In France, we might be able to influence it more because we will be civil parties. In other jurisdictions it is more difficult.

In terms of what the survivors want, they want their whole reality to be acknowledged. They want the authorities to make sure that they look into everything that has happened to them. But it also has to be balanced with the resources that those prosecutors and authorities have. They sometimes have very limited resources. This is also the reality of this work.

I think it is all about making sure that the survivors understand and that is why it is so important to have an NGO or a lawyer. Both are important to explain those things to them. In many contexts survivors understandably think that genocide is sort of the only charge that matters. I think it’s also our fault as people involved in this field, because sometimes we make it sound like this is the most important. But of course, crimes against humanity and war crime charges are also so important.

In the cases we were involved in, genocide charges were brought not in the beginning, but gradually. As the courts also upheld those decisions with genocide charges, I felt like the prosecutors were becoming more bold. They had more support and it is understandable. They would bring this more and more. I think there is a balance to make between what is possible and then what survivors want to see. And then it is all about transparency and constant communication.

Knowing that sexual and gender-based violence was not only widespread, but systematic in the crimes committed by Daesh against the Yazidi community, especially against women and girls, we would like to hear how these specific crimes were addressed. From your perspective, how were and are victims of sexual violence supported in the different justice systems during the proceeding – legally but also psychologically?

I have seen different practices based in different jurisdictions. The jurisdictions I have been working with, that were involving survivors of these crimes, really made sure to have measures available that would guarantee the well-being of the survivors, including psychologists, including continuous support, etc.

I think that in terms of the charges that were brought in those different cases, sexual violence could have been more of a focus. I feel like it was not enough. As you said, in the situation of the Yazidi that crime was really obvious. It should have been investigated and brought more, but it is also something that is recent in terms of the history of international criminal law. I think there’ i more progress to be made on that. I also think that there are other sets of crimes that should not be neglected. Yazidi, especially women and girls, were subjected to sexual violence. But Yazidi were also attacked based on their religion – there is also this aspect that needs to be more considered.

I feel like the past years, all these cases were almost test cases. We had nine cases in Germany, one in the Netherlands, one in Sweden – it is not that much if you think about the scale of the crimes. I think what needs to happen now is to have more people and maybe students like you to really analyze those decisions [the decisions issued by the different courts] to see what was done. And then make sure that there are academic writings and exchanges with the authorities to improve that process. NGOs have to play a role in that. I feel like we could have all done better but I also feel we all tried to do our best with the resources that we had. And hopefully this is just a first phase and more cases will come and will better address those crimes.

Could you tell us more how Yazda provides support for victims and how you adress their needs when they are participating in legal proceedings ?

Yazda, but also NGOs in general involved in documentation work, do not want to be perceived only as information providers. Of course, we have data that we are willing to share with the informed consent of survivors to progress criminal accountability, but we at Yazda also have a holistic approach to the support we can provide to the survivors.

We have psychologists in Yazda in-house, some of them have been trained for over a decade, and they are there to provide mental health support to the survivors before, during and after any process.

We also have drafted a guide based on all of our experiences in the cases in Germany, which is called “Get to Know Me First. A Survivor-Informed Guide for Interviewing Yazidis from Sinjar”. The guide gives very concrete advice to anyone who wants to interact with the Yazidi from Sinjar, especially war crimes units, lawyers, any justice actors, so that they have an understanding what does it even mean to be Yazidi, what is our religion, what is our history, what are taboos in our culture that they should be aware of, that if they might unwillingly do map of Sinjar – we realized sometimes people do not even even look at what Sinjar is. We have pictures of how a house looks in Sinjar. There is also the question of how to choose the right interpreter because in some of the cases in Germany, the dialect chosen was not the correct one and the survivor was just too intimidated to flag the fact that she could not understand the interpreter. Those are things that, as an NGO working in that space, we are able to flag. This guide is a public product now that we hope can be useful.

To give one example, in the Jennifer W. case, which is the first case where a German ISIS member was prosecuted for crimes against Yazidis in Munich, I attended the first hearing, when the survivors started to testify. I was there with a colleague from Sinjar. I speak German, and he speaks the Sinjar dialect that the survivors speak. We were just whispering to each other about what the judge was asking the survivor. We realized there was a huge misunderstanding, the interpreter was not correctly interpreting. It was creating a miscommunication between the the judge and the survivor. At some point the survivor was describing how she was tortured by being asked to stand on the roof under the sun, and this was burning her feet, it was burning her body, and she was describing that. She was just talking about that. And the judge could just not understand how she could stand on the roof. He kept asking her questions like, ‘How did you go on the roof? Who helped you?’ It was sort of an almost surreal interaction. Then we realized that the judge was picturing a roof that is like a triangle, like a roof we have a lot in Europe, for the rain to pour. Actually, in Iraq and in the Middle East, the roofs are flat because people also use the roof to sleep on them, when it is very hot, for different purposes.

These sort of like cultural differences really can make or break a case. Because of the misunderstanding it seemed that there were some questions about the credibility of the survivor. These issues are very important to address. I think NGOs, who are interacting daily with the community, can advise on these cultural linguistic, religious taboos and issues.

You also said earlier in the interview that you wanted to avoid the systematic framing of the crimes as terrorism cases. And specifically on sexual and gender-based violence, we wanted to have your opinion on whether there could be a risk that these specific crimes might be minimized or overshadowed, specifically when they are framed through the lens of terrorism.

I think cumulative prosecution, where you have both terrorism and international crimes prosecuted, are essential, because then allow to really give an accurate and full picture of what actually happened.

If you only prosecute for terrorism, you are ignoring a huge part of the story and a huge part of the suffering of the individual survivor and of the wider community. When you focus only on terrorism, then what you have in mind is the interest of the state, the interest of the national security, protecting the society, which is super important, of course, but you are completely disregarding the individual suffering of the survivor and wider community, which were also affected by the crimes.

We always advocate for both to be included – of course based on the evidence and what is available. But for international crimes to be prosecuted, the authorities need to take a further step and sometimes they do not have the evidence. Then they can come to us, to Yazda. Sometimes they do not have the resources. It is also for policymakers to give those entities enough resources to be able to look into those crimes. Because if you go for genocide, you need more resources, you need bigger teams, you need just more time as well. For us, it is important to to have both.

We also realized in the work we are doing, that in some jurisdictions, there is one unit that is working on terrorism, and then another unit that is working on crimes against humanity. They do not even talk to each other, there is no interaction. For us, it is very absurd for a group like ISIS, because we know that they are a terrorist group - that is internationally acknowledged - but they also commit international crimes against Yazidis, against Christians, against Kaka’i, Shabaks, against Muslims, against European journalists. It is very obvious, and they never have hidden that. So only going for terrorism is not acknowledging the full reality.

International crimes also allow you to uncover root causes of what happened, and why it happened. In the situation of the Yazidis, ISIS targeted them because of their ethnicity and mainly their religion. We often think of ISIS just as a terrorist group that appeared out of nowhere. They came to Syria and in Iraq and then they just started to commit those crimes. That is not the reality. In the case of the Sinjar attacks, the initial perpetrators who came and attacked the Yazidis were not foreigners, they were Iraqi. They were neighbors. They were people that Yazidis knew.

If you prosecute them only for terrorism and not for the international crimes, you do not really try to understand the underlying causes that led to the genocide. Then it means that this genocide could potentially happen again because you did not address the root causes, but also because you show people that they can commit genocide and will only be prosecuted for terrorism. There is no deterrent effect.

In terms of the sentencing, if you only go for terrorism, the sentencing will be lower than if you go for international crimes. Then the sentencing is just higher and accurately reflects the scale of the crimes.

You mentioned before the importance of the universal jurisdiction avenue for Yazda. One of our other guests we interviewed expressed a rather critical view of universal jurisdiction, suggesting that trials conducted far from the affected people and communities, such as those in France, for example, for crimes committed against the Yazidi people, can risk being largely symbolic or perceived as a form of neo-colonial justice. According to this perspective, meaningful justice requires proximity to the victims and proceedings held abroad may have limited resonance or impact for those most affected. As both a legal expert and a member of the Yazidi community, how would you respond to this perspective and what value do you see in universal jurisdiction cases for victims of these crimes?

I do sort of understand the reasoning, but I also think that it is really taking a shortcut, because if we would apply it to the Yazidi context, then it would mean that we would just wait for Iraq to prosecute international crimes like genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes, and they have not done a single case over the almost 11 years now since the start of the genocide. Same goes for Syria. They were not even functional until very recently and even now the situation is still very precarious.

I think that I would rather say that you do not need to have one or the other. Everything is complementary. I think it is very important to have prosecution happening close to the survivor communities in their country because ultimately Yazidis are in Iraq and the crimes happen in Iraq, so justice needs to happen there. We continue to advocate for that, but as you can see, it is just not happening, so we will continue doing that work.

In the meantime, universal jurisdiction cases outside are the only opportunity. So far, all these cases have been very well received by the affected community, by the survivors themselves. They said that it was the first time they felt like someone really cared about what had happened to them. I think we should be grateful to countries like Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands for having taken that step, and France as well is going to take that same route very soon. For me, those are all complementary things that need to happen at the same time, ideally, but if not, they happen at different stages.

A criticism we also had towards the cases in Germany, and that we addressed with the prosecutor, is that there has to be better outreach when you have these cases. The information has to come back home, and I think this is again a role that civil society can play.

For example, we were always publishing press releases when there were milestones in those cases, and also translating them to Arabic. We also did a very recent video about the Hasna A. case in the Netherlands. Hasna A. was a Dutch national who was convicted for crimes against the Yazidi.

The Dutch authorities made the effort to make available a link where survivors in different countries could join and listen to the hearing, as well as the verdict. Yazda organized a screening in Sinjar with survivors, and also in Tahrouk, in Kurdistan. It was the first time and maybe the last time many survivors were witnessing justice happening on the screen. It was a very powerful moment. Of course, they had a lot of questions. They had a lot of things they raised. It was very interesting to observe.

I would encourage countries to do that when they can. I know every jurisdiction also has their own rules about making those trials publicly visible. But I think when we have universal jurisdiction cases, there is the universal elements so it has to be somehow more visible than a regular national case and I think more work needs to be done around that.

I disagree on the statement made by the other interviewee in the in the sense that for me all these things are complementary, and you cannot tell a survivor to wait in Iraq for justice to happen home like it’s just not realistic.