On 3 August 2014 Islamic State forces attacked the Sinjar region of northern Iraq. Kurdish peshmerga units withdrew ahead of them without evacuating the population, a decision that remains bitterly disputed within Yazidi politics. Men and adolescent boys were separated and shot. Women and girls were taken and sold into sexual slavery, a practice the organisation set out and justified in its own publications rather than concealing. Younger boys were taken for indoctrination and military training. Tens of thousands fled up Mount Sinjar and were besieged there without water in August heat until a corridor was forced open.
A retrospective household survey published in PLOS Medicine in 2017 estimated that about 3,100 Yazidis were killed and about 6,800 abducted in the first days of the attack, some 9,900 people in all, and roughly a fortieth of the region's Yazidi population. Thousands are still unaccounted for. In June 2016 the United Nations Commission of Inquiry on Syria concluded, in a report titled They Came to Destroy, that Islamic State had committed genocide against the Yazidis, alongside crimes against humanity and war crimes. Iraq passed a Yazidi Survivors Law providing reparations in 2021, and the German Bundestag recognised the genocide in January 2023; other parliaments have done likewise.
The aftermath has forced change inside a religion built on purity and descent. Yazidi teaching had held that sexual contact outside the community, and conversion even under compulsion, placed a person beyond its boundary. In 2015 the Baba Sheikh issued a decree welcoming enslaved women back into the faith, and survivors were received and rebaptised at Lalish, a substantial doctrinal accommodation made quickly and under pressure. The status of children born of rape has proved far harder. A 2019 statement by the community's senior spiritual body that appeared to accept such children was withdrawn or reinterpreted within days, and the question is unresolved.
More than a decade on, Sinjar remains substantially depopulated and large numbers of Yazidis are still in camps in the Duhok region.