Yazidi survivors confront the harsh reality of return

Peering out the window of her family home in northern Iraq, 18-year-old Sandra Qasim describes unruly, unpaved roads and rubble lining the streets. A few doors down, displaced families have taken up temporary residence in the local schoolhouse.   

Just four months prior, Sandra had been studying nursing in Lychen, Brandenburg, and was looking forward to a fulfilling career. Today, she feels hopeless after Germany deported her and her family to Iraq.  

The Qasim family of six are Yazidi, a Kurdish-speaking religious minority that in 2014 faced a genocide at the hands of the Islamic State (IS) in northern Iraq and northeast Syria. In response, several European Union states offered sanctuary to tens of thousands of Yazidi refugees.  

But Germany's rightward political shift in recent years has fuelled rising xenophobia, making the country a less welcoming home for the Qasims and leading to their deportation in July. It is estimated that as many as 10,000 Yazidis are currently at risk of being deported back to Iraq.

The Qasim family, who arrived in Germany in 2022, had their initial asylum case rejected by the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF) in 2023. The court found the family's claim for asylum protection to be "manifestly unfounded".

Just days before July's deportation, an urgent appeal was filed to the Potsdam Administrative Court. The court accepted the appeal, suspending the deportation order, but it was already too late. The family's flight to Iraq had already departed.  

To make matters worse, an emergency appeal filed days later by the family's lawyer seeking their immediate return to Germany was then rejected, and the original 2023 ruling was upheld.  

Back in Sinjar, the Qasims have been surviving on donations from friends and family back in Germany. Potentially unable to pay rent, Sandra fears they could become homeless and be forced to join those other families at the school.   

"My life in Germany was good," says Sandra, who hoped to start work as a nurse later this year. "All of my dreams have been taken away."

Life amid the ruins

The family is still desperately seeking a return to Germany. While the last official court ruling in their case found there was no longer sufficient evidence of a significant threat to Yazidis in Iraq, the reality on the ground paints a starkly different picture.  

Sandra's family lives in Dugure, Sinjar—a haunted landscape. In 2014, IS militants rampaged through the Yazidi ancestral homeland, seeking to eradicate the community via forced displacement, enslavement and mass murder—ultimately killing or kidnapping an estimated 10,000 Yazidis.   

Today, Sandra says, parts of Sinjar remain ghost towns, with debris lining the streets and other signs of the devastation IS left behind. During the assault, irrigation canals, wells, hospitals and schools were destroyed, rendering the region's infrastructure largely useless.   

Lacking clean water, many homeowners have dug wells in their yards to access groundwater, though its high salt content makes it unsafe to drink. Most rely on water tanks delivered by aid groups and NGOs. Sinjar lacks a working sewage system or municipal waste management, and on good days, locals have electricity for only five or six hours.   

A contested region

The security situation is equally precarious. Armed fighters of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), a Turkey-founded group labelled a terrorist organisation by the US and the EU, roam the streets near the Qasims' home. The armed group established a foothold in Sinjar in 2014 after moving in to create a safe corridor for Yazidis fleeing the IS assault. 

Fighting involving the PKK and its affiliates, and other militias backed by Iran and Turkey, is technically on pause, but fears remain that violence could restart at any time. It remains to be seen if the PKK's declaration to disarm and dissolve will extend to its fighters in Sinjar. Meanwhile, Baghdad and the Kurdistan Regional Government continue to contest control of the strategically significant region.

Elsewhere in Iraq, IS sleeper cells and sympathisers carry out sporadic attacks. In August, a video circulated on Iraqi TV that appeared to show an IS militant executing an Arab shepherd south of Al-Ba'aj, some 50km from Yazidi-majority areas.   

The incident sparked Yazidi fears that the days of atrocities may be returning, particularly as many believe that the issues that enabled the rise of IS have not been resolved. Anti-Yazidi hate speech is common, with clerics often accused of inciting violence in sermons and on social media.  

"Yazidis continue to face discrimination and persecution," Sufyan Ali, a Sinjar-based Yazidi activist, tells Qantara. "Our community has little trust in the security forces currently deployed here. They have not demonstrated either the capacity or the willingness to offer genuine protection."

More deportation orders have been sent

Germany is home to the largest Yazidi diaspora community in Europe—around 200,000, with most arriving in the past dozen years. For more than a decade, Germany has actively supported and sheltered Yazidis, offering asylum and psychological care.   

But the political pressure to accelerate deportations has surged this year, placing countless Yazidi families at renewed risk. Murad, a 25-year-old living in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia with his wife and child, received a deportation order last month.  

Most of Murad's family and friends fled to Germany in 2014, while he stayed behind to care for his grandmother, witnessing the genocide and its aftermath firsthand. "I saw people being brutally killed and others dying while trying to flee," he recalls.   

In 2023, after his grandmother passed away, Murad and his wife sold their possessions to finance the journey to Germany. "Life in Iraq had become unbearable," says Murad, whose son was born in Germany in 2024. "Minorities can no longer live in safety—the situation has only worsened since 2014."

Diagnosed with depression and anxiety, Murad's wife has been receiving medical care in Germany. The news of the deportation order has hit her hard. Around the same time, she and Murad learned that a close friend staying in an Iraqi camp for the internally displaced had committed suicide.  

"Authorities have defied court orders"

Without a complete halt on deportations, critics say Germany is failing a still-traumatised community. A growing number of German politicians have spoken out to stop the deportations. Green opposition MP Max Lucks has called for the Qasim family to be brought back immediately and for the resignation of BAMF president Hans-Eckhard Sommer.

"It is a disgrace that the authorities have defied court orders to deport a Yazidi family into a country where they continue to be threatened," Lucks told Qantara. "That is our humanitarian responsibility, especially given the brutal genocide of the Yazidis that our very parliament recognised two years ago." 

For the Qasims, legal efforts are ongoing to enable their return to Germany. For now, they can do little more than wait for a decision on their latest appeal.

"Our entire future has been lost; there is nothing here for us," says Sandra. "I would do anything to have my life back in Germany."