Lse Middle East Centre Podcasts

This event launches the paper “Yazidis and ISIS: The Causes and Consequences of Sexual Violence in Conflict” published under the LSE Conflict Research Programme by Principal Investigator Dr. Zeynep Kaya. It has been five years since ISIS brought the Yazidi community in Iraq to the brink of destruction. Some women and children held by ISIS have been re-captured by criminal gangs to be trafficked or sold to their families. Those that managed to escape the brutal attacks have ended up in displacement camps scattered around Iraqi Kurdistan, with a small number relocating to Western countries as refugees. This report shows that preventing sexual violence in conflict is not possible without tackling the underlying structural factors that foster this form of violence. Militant radical groups such as ISIS use specific gender norms in connection with perceived religious/sectarian identities in order to morally justify and organise violence. ISIS’s attacks on the Yazidis showed again that gender (and gendered violen