Khalidah Shammo was 4 years old when she moved with her family to Nebraska from Shingal, Iraq, as Fatima Naqi and Kassidy Arena explain.
Now 16, she attends Lincoln High School and advocates to teach her peers about the genocide in which her family and friends in northern Iraq were attacked 10 years ago. Shammo and her family are Yazidi.
On Aug. 3, 2014, Islamic State militants attacked a Yazidi town in Sinjar, Iraq, leading to hundreds of thousands fleeing for their lives over a three-year span. Many Yazidis were trapped on the Sinjar mountain after the ISIS attack and died due to heat exposure.
The minority group was targeted due to its religious beliefs, and many were either killed or forced into slavery and to convert to Islam. Shammo’s parents pulled her out of summer camp on the day of the first organized attack.
“It was really scary. Even though it didn’t impact me directly, it still did because it was my family,” she recalled. “It’s hard hearing your grandma cry over the phone because she doesn’t want to leave the place that she grew up in.”
Shammo's grandmother eventually left, although her grandfather stayed behind, she told Nebraska Public Media.
Building a home in Lincoln
Lincoln is said to be home to the largest Yazidi community in the U.S. at around 3,000-4,000. Haroon Al Hayder moved with his family to the U.S. in 2016 and to Nebraska’s capital in 2020 for the affordable living, low unemployment and welcoming attitude.
“Whenever Yazidis would come to this part of the world, the first question is, like, ‘Are there any Yazidis? Where do you think our Yazidis are?’ ‘Oh, I hear someone that is in Lincoln, Nebraska.’ So I think that the story started there,” he said.
Al Hayder is originally from Duhok, a city in northern Iraq. He recalled the happy memories of Duhok before the genocide started.
“Life was really good, people were making a lot of progress and everything was normal,” he said.
Until, he added, the genocide from 2014-2017 took everything from the Yazidis in Iraq.
“It pushed everybody 30 years back, the efforts, hard work and dedication just turned to ashes,” Al Hayder said.
Nadia’s Initiative, a global nonprofit, is working to help Yazidis throughout the world recover from the genocide and damage it caused. It was named after one of the founders, Nadia Murad, a survivor of sexual violence and Yazidi human rights activist. Murad co-founded the organization with her now husband, University of Nebraska-Lincoln graduate Abid Shamdeen.
The initiative raises awareness about Yazidis, works toward sexual violence prevention and is rebuilding what ISIS destroyed in the Yazidi homeland of Sinjar, Iraq, Shamdeen said.
Getting to know Yazidis
“The world got to know Yazidis, unfortunately, through this genocide," Shamdeen explained.
He estimated around 180,000 Yazidis are still displaced internally in Iraq, with more than 2,500 women and children still missing from 2014.
“The community is still not fully recovered because they haven’t received the support that they need in order to do that,” Shamdeen said. “Both Iraqi and Kurdish governments failed to protect the community that they owe them reparations."
Al Hayder added one of the hardest parts of fleeing was not knowing where his childhood friends ended up. But in Lincoln, he found a community that knows what he’s been through.
“It just made me feel like, you know, I’m home," Al Hayder said, "Being surrounded by my people…it’s kind of shared sadness and shared happiness and we share the same community together."
According to the U.S. Department of State, the number of people killed remains unknown and discoveries of mass graves continue.
“I saw big trucks of people coming to our town covered with dust, unrecognizable individuals including kids and men," Al Hayder recalled. "That’s something that I can never forget, you can’t even find it in movies because it was so real."
Al Hayder was a university student in Iraq at the beginning of the genocide. He interpreted for some European journalists who covered the genocide in Iraq.
“I actually got an opportunity to listen to some of the survivors who were held as sex slaves for the ISIS terrorists, sharing their stories. It was…” Al Hayder paused, searching for the words. “Wow. How could this be happening in the 21st century? So those are some really strong emotions that are still in my memories, but I use it, in a way, to advocate for my community.”
Al Hayder now works to make sure Nebraskans are aware of what happened to his community 10 years ago, and the ongoing persecution they experience in Iraq.
In addition, he is a senior school community coordinator at Lincoln High School, the president and founder of Nebraska Soccer Club and is currently pursuing a master's and PhD at UNL in communications studies. He’s worked on Yazidi cultural education by co-organizing a panel discussion on the Yazidi genocide–of which Shammo was one of the speakers.
“I think being silent is a lot more harmful than being loud and open about the genocide,” Shammo said.
Al Hayder also connected with a project called Nobody’s Listening—a virtual reality experience that allows people to see the destroyed houses in Iraq and hear survivors’ stories. And to build empathy.
“Hopefully, this will really create a sense of awareness and a sense of understanding that the Yazidis are an essential part of this community,” he said. “That also they have, despite all of the genocides, despite all the suffering that they’ve gone through, they’re actually the most resilient, most adaptable and most dedicated and hardworking people I’ve ever seen in my life.”
Al Hayder added he feels the Yazidi community is “woven into the fabric” of Lincoln by creating and filling jobs, contributing to the community and bringing more diversity.
A few years ago, the Yazidi community established a national cemetery near Lincoln. It is the only one in the U.S. Yazidi funeral traditions are closely associated with the land. Before the cemetery was established, they would send their deceased loved ones back to Iraq.
Advocates said the establishment of a Yazidi cemetery in Lincoln made the community feel like they truly belong in the state.
“The genocide is ongoing, to be honest [because] there are consequences and things after the genocide,” Yazda Vice President Hadi Pir said. “The trauma, the loss of culture, the disbursement of people randomly going and escaping to other countries.”
Yazda is an international organization established to advocate for and document the plight of Yazidis throughout the globe. It’s also the group that sponsored that virtual reality project in partnership with Al Hayder. Pir works out of the Lincoln office. He lost a good friend, presumably dead, in the years of the genocide. He still believes there is a lack of accountability from the global community for the genocide 10 years ago.
Pir said although Lincoln has been especially welcoming to the relatively young Yazidi community, there are still obstacles preventing many from settling in. He added they often struggle finding jobs, getting financial resources and making sure their kids don’t forget their cultural traditions.
“To the young generation, everything that happened is just history. To us, it’s still not and will stay with us,” Pir said.
The future generations
For Shammo, the memory of leaving Iraq to make a home in Nebraska is very present.
“We didn’t have anything when we came here," Shammo said. "We had family, which was everything, but we still didn’t have like, the tools to be successful. So [my parents] made those tools for themselves.”
Shammo, who hopes to start a career in software development or neuroscience, said she couldn’t be more proud of her family. And she wants her story to inspire other Yazidis to come forward and share their stories, not just about the genocide 10 years ago, but what makes them proud of their identity.
Shammo visited Iraq after the genocide. She loved it and doesn’t want it to be seen as scary, but at the same time, it is. There are still cases of sex trafficking and forced conversions. Even though it has been 10 years, she has found people often don’t talk about it.
“I am afraid that we lose our culture, language, food and other customs since people hesitate to share it,” she added. “But I say hold on to the Yazidi culture, language (Kurmanji), food, traditional outfits and other cultural values.”
Like SarSal for example, the Yazidi New Year, which is one of her favorite holidays.
She encourages people, especially her generation, to learn about who they are, raise their voice, write about it and volunteer to let people know what happened to them and their community.
