Open Journal of Social Sciences, 2019, 7, 7-17 http://www.scirp.org/journal/jss ISSN Online: 2327-5960 ISSN Print: 2327-5952 DOI: 10.4236/jss.2019.77002 Jul. 10, 2019 7 Open Journal of Social Sciences Changes in the Yazidi Society and Religion after the Genocide—A Growing Rapprochement with Human Rights? Jan Ilhan Kizilhan 1,2 1 The Institute for Transcultural Health Science, Baden-Wuerttemberg Cooperative State University, Villingen-Schwenningen, Germany 2 Institute für Psychotherapy and Psychotraumatology, University of Duhok, KRI, Iraq Abstract In 2014 the troops of the self-proclaimed “Islamic State” conquered the areas of northern Iraq and turned on the long-established religious minorities in the area with tremendous brutality, especially towards the Yazidi. Huge numbers of men were executed; thousands upon thousands of women and children were abducted and wilfully subjected to sexual violence. Although the Yazidi have violated religious rules which have existed for over 800 years by taking women back who have been raped during their captivity at the hands of the IS, they refuse to accept the children resulting from rape by IS terrorists because a person can only be Yazidi by birth. The Yazidis therefore faced with the question as to how far the Yazidi community is coping with the disaster and the new challenges of a changed society with regard to hu- man rights. Keywords Yazidi, Terror, Religion, Human Rights, Society, ISIS 1. Introduction The Yazidi faith does not know a compulsory religious scripture comparable to the Bible for Christians. Religious traditions and beliefs have mostly been passed orally from one generation to the next generation. Yet there are generally bind- ing concepts of faith [1]. Human rights and their understanding of religion are characterised by cultural, political and social memory, which to date has been accompanied by persecution, flight, oppression and massacre. A mixture of col- lective-patriarchal values and norms with universal religious ideas characterises How to cite this paper: Kizilhan, J.I. (2019) Changes in the Yazidi Society and Religion after the Genocide—A Growing Rapprochement with Human Rights? Open Journal of Social Sciences, 7, 7-17. https://doi.org/10.4236/jss.2019.77002 Received: June 10, 2019 Accepted: July 7, 2019 Published: July 10, 2019 Copyright © 2019 by author(s) and Scientific Research Publishing Inc. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution International License (CC BY 4.0). http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Open Access