 So, welcome everybody. I want to welcome you to the U.S. Institute of Peace. My name is Nancy Lindborg. I'm the president and CEO of the U.S. Institute of Peace and welcome everyone to a very important, probably sobering event and a very special film screening. I want to thank, in particular, the German Embassy and the Kurdistan Regional Government Representation in the United States for partnering with us on this event. A very special and warm welcome to the German Ambassador to the United States, Ambassador Emily Haber and two members of the Iraqi Embassy. We have a special guest with us, Minister Safin Desaye, who's the head of the Kurdistan Regional Government Department of Foreign Relations, who is happily visiting Washington this week. So, thank you for putting this on your itinerary. And, of course, our good friend, the Kurdistan Regional Government Representative, Bayan Sami Abdul-Krahman. Thank you, all of you, for your partnership, for helping to make this event happen today. With a special welcome to Gwyn Roberts, who is the director and the producer of the film that we'll see. So, this is a very special opportunity. And his film, One Azidi Family vs. ISIS, captures the kind of unimaginable realities that many of us read about, that so many Azidis experienced under the brutality of ISIS. And while there was widespread cruelty and many, many were affected by ISIS, the Azidis, of course, were singled out for their faith and were victims of what can only be described as genocide. This film helps us to understand and remember their stories and to redouble our conviction to work for the kind of world where this won't happen. U.S. Institute of Peace was founded by Congress 35 years ago, specifically with the mission to prevent, mitigate, and resolve violent conflict by working with partners around the world. And through our history, we've been very humbled and honored to work with the kind of very courageous men and women who are depicted in this film. We've worked in Iraq since 2003, and we have long partnered with the many religious communities that make up that very rich mosaic in Iraq, the Christians, the Shabbat, of course, the Yazidis, and many others. And today, post-ISIS, we continue to work with those communities as they seek to heal and to facilitate their ability to return home. I was in Iraq this past spring. I had the privilege of visiting the religious home of the Yazidis, the Lalish Temple, where I was able to meet their spiritual leader, Baba Sheikh. And, of course, he courageously broke with tradition and welcomed the Yazidi women back to the community who had been captured by ISIS. And I met four of the women on my trip, and, like so many Yazidi women, they survived the worst horrors perpetrated by ISIS. And to me, their stories just really demonstrated, in a way, that's hard to fathom, but how deep these wounds run and how long it will take them and really the entire community to recover from the devastation of ISIS. Of course, now more than five years after ISIS attacked Sinjar, there are still some 300,000 Yazidis who remain displaced, who are eager to get home. So after the film, we will be able to have a facilitated discussion about these challenges and how the international community can help more Yazidis return home. Before I turn things over to our next speaker, I just want to say that I know many of us are watching very closely the current situation in Iraq, where the widespread demonstrations in Baghdad and the southern provinces have really underscored that some of the core grievances that gave rise to ISIS in the first place still need to be addressed. So this is a pivotal moment for Iraq. The protests demonstrate that people really do want an accountable, non-sectarian government, and this is crucial to building lasting peace and stability in Iraq. And I take some hope that there is an intent for the protests to be peaceful with hopes that they can remain so. With that, I'm really delighted to introduce someone whose government has been a leader in helping communities in Iraq recover from ISIS, the German ambassador to the United States Emily Haber. Prior to her appointment as ambassador, Ambassador Haber was deployed to the federal ministry of the interior. She served as state secretary and in that role she oversaw security and migration at the height of the refugee crisis in Europe. So she knows these issues intimately and has been a real force, a positive force. And the government of Germany continues to play a key role in the stabilization, providing emergency aid and psychosocial support to the most vulnerable victims. Among the members of the global coalition to defeat ISIS, Germany follows the United States as the second largest donor. So we're quite honored to be able to partner with the German embassy to have you here with us today, Ambassador Haber. Please join me in welcoming her. Ms. Lindstrom, Excellencies and Gwen Roberts. First of all, thank you that you made it possible for me to join you here today. And I've been tasked to introduce Gwen Roberts, who has produced the documentary we're going to see now. And that is going to tell us the story of a human catastrophe by portraying one family. I haven't seen the film as yet, but I'm looking very much forward to it. As Mrs. Lindstrom has mentioned, at the time when that happened, when the catastrophe unfolded, I was a state secretary in our interior ministry and I in fact oversaw questions of security and questions of migration. And when we witnessed how ISIS overran the Sinjar mountains and wreaked havoc in Yazidi communities, Yazidi villages, Yazidi families and over actually a rich and very ancient history, it had an immediate effect on us. Not only because actually we saw the echoes on German streets in cities like Hildesheim and Bremen were actually and understandably for many of my colleagues in the interior ministry, because as opposed to me, they hadn't been working in the foreign ministry before. Understandably for them, when Chechen suddenly attacked Kurds, they asked them, so what's happening here? These were the echoes of what happened not in another world, but actually quite close to us. And perhaps that made it possible for us to immediately confront the question, how can we help? Helping by welcoming Yazidi refugees or those who were lucky enough to escape death and the catastrophe by welcoming them in Germany, I personally was involved in the effort of the federal state of Baden-Württemberg that welcomed many of them. Today, I believe we are the largest, we have the largest Yazidi community in the world, 200,000, but it wasn't the only question we faced. We also discussed, is that the right way ahead? What can we do to help in the ancestral areas where the Yazidi came from between Nineveh and in Sinjar? What can we do to help in northern Iraq by building schools or kindergartens or rebuilding infrastructure and streets and sewers or hospitals by supporting the camps where we try to help by setting up clinics and procuring simple things like clean water or sanitation? I'm sure the film I said it to the producer before will tell me a lot about mistakes we've always made. If you do things, you make mistakes. But I'm just telling all of you this because I want you to understand that actually we were dedicated to good and to help. Now I'm looking forward to your film. Gwyn Roberts has an extensive experience in the region. I know that you've already traveled the Kurdish region as early as the early 1970s and you have tracked from the from northern Syria through the Kurdish mountains to Iraq and then even Iran in the early 1980s and over many many years you have covered the Iraq in what you produced. You are an Emmy Award winner and your work is well known. I think we're in for a true experience because I cannot think of a more powerful way to tell the story of what I called a human catastrophe by telling the story of what it meant to humans, to individual humans. I think we'll have a lasting effect. Thank you very much. Thank you so much for such a lovely introduction. I must say that my closeness to the story itself has made me realize what a fantastic contribution the German government has made to helping the Yazidis. It's quite exceptional. I just wouldn't wish that Britain had also done as much to make a difference to their lives. So thank you very very much indeed. It's a great honor to be here to speak to you. As you gather my name is Gwyn Roberts and as a journalist and filmmaker I've been covering Kurdistan since March 1974 and that was the beginning of the Kurdish uprising against Baghdad. I was there when the whole thing collapsed and that was also horrendous when the Shah and Henry Kissinger with Drew's support abruptly from the Kurds and they were left absolutely bereft. Now this has become a recurring pattern in the whole story. When I first traveled there I was a correspondent for a correspondent not a staff correspondent but a freelance correspondent for the New York Times and the Financial Times. And in 1981 I began to shoot my own films and that was the beginning of a journey right across Kurdistan being shipped across the Tigris on a rubber tube, the inner tube of a lorita, into Turkey and then clandestinely right across the region. Seeing what Saddam Hussein had done to that region was quite phenomenal. Houses had been destroyed, wells concreted over, orchards absolutely reduced to nothing and it was a very moving journey. I sort of still remember every few moments of that journey but for me it was an awareness that Saddam Hussein actually sealed off hermetically the whole region and then they were doing whatever they wanted to do to the Kurds and that meant stripping from their homes, moving them out of a 20 kilometer deep area, banishing them to the south of Iraq and it was an eye opener. I couldn't believe that this was actually happening. Anyway more recently, I mean I've made many many films about Kurdistan but more recently I founded the Kurdistan Memory Program, the KMP. Our projects have been running for about 12 years and what we're seeking to do is document the Kurdish history for the world. The film, the data and historical multimedia we're producing are the foundation of a new national historical archive that has been built in Kurdistan. This will be housed at the Kurdistan Museum in Abil, which has been designed by the American architect Daniel Liebeskind and we hope will be constructed in the coming years. Of course because of my work with the KMP, I've been traveling the length and breadth of Iraqi Kurdistan with my team, most of them Kurds I may say, and we've been interviewing everyday people and gathering testimony from victims of genocide. And so inevitably the ISIS invasion of the Yazidi homeland in northwestern Iraq became a really important focus for this project and the destruction of identity and the erasure of cultural heritage has been common place in Kurdistan over the centuries. Just to give you an example, during 1988 some 4,500 villages were reduced to rubble by the Iraqi army. There they produced the most incredible carpets, wonderful designs which stretch back thousands of years. These carpets have an individual language totally wiped out and that's what they did to them. They just destroyed their culture. Yet this process of destruction, dispossession and cultural erasure is also a contemporary issue as you see in our film tonight. Since 2000 ISIS or Daesh has destroyed the homes that we think more than 1.5 million people in Iraq and Syria. Their surviving victims have experienced traumas that will last a lifetime. Our film tonight is about the Yazidi family who were captured by ISIS but who survived to tell their story. We visited their homeland in Sinjar in northwestern Iraq in January 2014, seven months before the ISIS invasion. Even then this was considered a very dangerous place to visit. Al Qaeda affiliates were operating there and seven years earlier had been responsible for one of the worst terrorist attacks since 9-11 in which 800 Yazidis were killed. In Sinjar we found a family who we later filmed over a period of years. They were just 1000, there were just one of thousands of Yazidi families who suffered terribly under ISIS. These families are a timely reminder what a resurgent ISIS could do to minorities across Iraq and Syria and I know there are estimates that there's a force of between 15 and 20,000 ISIS members now operating in the No Man's Land between Kursan region and the Iraqi government. So we need to be aware that this is happening as I speak. As you will see in this film these people are not just statistics, they are deeply human lives that are being torn apart by geopolitical events beyond their control. Earlier this year we presented the film at the United Nations headquarters in New York. The then president of the UN Security Council Christoph Hoysken made a comment in his speech at the event that has stayed with me. He said what really marked the film out was that it focused on the fate of a single family. When we hear of the 65 million people that are refugees today this is just a number he said but when we talk about 65 million refugees we are really talking about 65 million individual fates. Right now there are more than 17,000 refugees who have flooded into the Kursan region following Turkey's recent invasion of non-Syria. If the situation worsens and it probably will these numbers will rise massively. I'll let the film speak for itself but as you watch it please consider that it subjects a real people who need and deserve our support. Thank you ladies and gentlemen. Good afternoon. Is this working? Yeah. Well I think it will take me also a moment to recover from this. Usually I got back from Iraq two days ago and usually coming back from the field and seeing the communities it's always a lot of emotions that I have to work through but then have this surge of emotions through the film watching it for the third time. I think it will show on my performance moderating this discussion so I apologize in advance. My name is Sarhan Hamasahid. I'm the director of Middle East programs here at USIP and I have the honor to facilitate the segment of the program a discussion about the film and what's happening in the two Yazidi community. I have the honor here to be enjoined by Mr. Gwyn Roberts who is the filmmaker, the producer and the director of one Yazidi family versus ISIS which we just watched and we have the honor and we've been joined by Ambassador Farid Yasin, Iraq's ambassador to the United States and we are also joined by Ms. Bayan Rahman, the representative of the Kurdistan regional government to the United States. I'll start with talking to Mr. Roberts and the format for the discussion. I'll ask him some questions then I'll follow up with a couple of questions to the ambassador and representative Rahman and then we'll open it up for discussion for questions from from you all and we have mic runners on both sides of the room. Mr. Roberts thank you very much for this very powerful film and thank you for taking the time to take to come such a long way to be with us coming from the UK I believe today and we really really appreciate it. I really like this film for many reasons. It is I mean there is power there is power I mean something is also mentioned alluded to there's power to saying for example in Iraq the conflict produced five million people acts of genocide and a lot of displacements and thousands of people killed but at some point people get numb to the snow in those numbers and just they become numbers and in our line of work I usually try with words express what happened to those communities I use terms like ISIS shredded the fabric of society or ISIS shattered the sense of community like you break glass just to try to portray an image but what you depicted so powerfully directly through the stories of these people no words but their words can can express so truly thank you for doing that you've taken us for a deep dive and showing us the cost of conflict and humanized and giving us the humanizing in the face of that taking us to a really a molecule and in that molecule you see a world of pain and if that's an appropriate term to use a world of pain for each individual of that family and a world of pain for the family as a unit and it just shows the range of issues that the region suffered in terms of loss of life the surviving sexual slavery displacement and many other forms of human suffering so perhaps staying with the family if I can start with do you have any updates about the family that you can share since you filmed the film well thank you very much for your comments it was I must say an extremely difficult film to make not least because initially we're extremely worried about where we crossing red lines in terms of the way we treated their experiences at the hands of ISIS and so initially you will see a lot of shots of the girls very close up and you can't identify them but what we did was to keep very close to the family and ask them all the way through you know for the permission what do they want to do do they want us to continue and the message was loud and clear they wanted us to continue and to tell their story so it was very very important to have their backing to do this but it was a difficult film to make and I think everyone involved in it near us for example you remember the time you were doing their translation of their what they said just how difficult it was to deal with everyone in the edit and so on were in tears a lot of the time now the the family seems to be getting on quite well we from time to time let them know that the film is it was shown on the BBC and other times I'd yet to let them know that it was going to be shown today but we we have contact through our office in a bill with them in Stuttgart because I don't speak Kurdish so it has to go through Kurdish speakers but they seem to be doing well and the thing that really heartened me was the children because they suffered terribly and they coming out of it so positively you know and you saw the benefits of what you did by bringing them to Germany and the fact that they can have a normal life in the schools you know with other children was fantastic I'm just that it's so beneficial to their recovery I'm sure they will thank you very very much from the bottom of their hearts for allowing it to happen thank you so one of the striking things about the family and the AZD community is that these people have not been combatants the AZD community they have not been party to the conflict they were not fighting they did not have a conflict of their own so and yet they have suffered really heinous crimes and we see the tragic stories but then you've covered that region so is the story of the Chateau family a unique story and if I can ask you since then have you gone back to the Sinjar area or engaged with the community what update can you give us from what you film to where you see the situation of the AZD as a community well I've not gone back to the Sinjar region because it's quite unstable and quite dangerous a lot of it has been destroyed and so sending them back to that area is it seems to me a hopeless quest really because what are they going back to what actually happened or seems to have happened is that the villages around them where there were supporters of ISIS still have supporters of ISIS they've gone back after ISIS collapse to their villages and what could happen again is that they come out and rejoin ISIS if it reforms as we think it is reforming and that could you know it would be not a good idea for them to go back to be horrendous risks and this political instability in that region as well so what was the first question was their story unique it's not unique the intensity of what happened you know with six girls two being killed when they tried to flee and for in captivity and then them being rescued by their brother effectively and also by contributions from the AZD community in Germany it doesn't it does repeat itself but not quite in that way I mean the lots of people have suffered terribly have been bought out of captivity and you have been deeply traumatized so yeah no it's not unique but in the intensity with which that family experience the number of children involved I think it possibly is unique so if you broaden this a little bit I mean you've covered as it was said earlier by the introduction by Ambassador Haber and others you've been covering and your comments you've been covering the region for a long time you've covered different governments different systems different parts of the country and this is a region that unfortunately does not have a that is not short on a supply of painful stories and I remember some of my own stories living in the Kurdistan region when the infall happened I remember my own stories and then 1996 translating similar kind of stories about the survivors and I have stories from my work as a professional of mass killings and genocide against the AZDs the Christians and mass killing against others in other parts of Iraq again so this seems like the cycles of violence that bleed into each other and you've covered them from from different angles I wanted to get your thoughts on that and if you have any thoughts of from your observations what could help break those cycles well the main difference in this case is that there's been enormous publicity publicizing what's happened to the AZDs and whereas before I mentioned in my initial comments about you know being floated across the Tigris from Turkey from Syria into Turkey and then crossing into Iraq what happened was that the area was completely hermetically sealed horrible things were happening and no one found out about it then when we start going into the villages now and doing effectively historical journalism at interviewing people and ask them what happened to you personally what can you tell us about your experience and repeating the interviews ad infinitum right across the Kurdish regions and you begin to realize that what happened to ISIS happened in happened to the AZDs happened equally to the Kurds generally across the Kurdish region I mean as I said there were 45,000 villages of all now thousand villages destroyed you know their whole cultural community of their textiles wiped out and people taken off and shot and killed in mass graves I mean mass executions and what was interesting there were occasional survivors of these executions who told in grim detail what had happened this is an episode in Iraq's history that has largely gone it's not it's not gone untold but it's been forgotten about and people like to walk away from it and what we're trying to do is actually is try and bring it live with interviews with film with archive footage and so on to make people aware that this has happened it's not what's happening to ISIS is not a new experience at all and there are cycles of violence in Iraq which of course will repeat themselves it's a matter of there's been no process of truth and reconciliation as they were saying Sierra Leone it is sort of desperately needed so people come to terms with what has happened and until there is there's no there's no solution to this because in the future I would predict there will be recurrences of this sort of behavior it may involve ISIS it may involve other sectors of the Iraqi community thank you so would that I transition to I mean asking you about I mean trauma and resilience in some of the conversations and videos of interviews I've seen you talk about trauma and one thing that stuck with me another documentary that I have seen that features the journalist Michael Ware titled the film only the dead see the war the end of war basically their way of saying that the issue of trauma has lasting effects and those things stay with you and I wanted to ask you and we've seen us the Chateau family survive and we as you've mentioned earlier that you chose to give us an uplifting sort of uplifting ending there so I wanted to get your thoughts on trauma and resilience in the context that you've worked with in in this project we've interviewed countless survivors of unfile and of ISIS and so on and trauma is something that we experience you know the people's trauma just comes at you and trauma is quite extraordinary because it's not something that the person tells you and you can shield yourself behind your journalistic you know professional shield it comes through that shield if you to to understand what they've been through you've got to empathize you've got to understand and feel a little bit of what has happened to them and I can tell you that it's like having a wire extended between you and them and it's like a live current at times coming along that wire and it is it's painful so there's a sort of limit to the amount of times you can do this now I remember once we were in Rania talking to a guy who'd been in Balasang when it was gassed in 1987 and he'd been with his father he'd been blinded and he was taken they were taken to a bus and they were going to be taken by the Iraqis to to Abil for treatment and he was taken with his father and he couldn't see anything and at one point his father said to him son it's all over he was being dragged off by the guards and they were separated he never saw his father after that and he told the story and he broke down and I tell you I broke down with him and throughout the day and throughout the next day I had a searing headache you know you just can't deal with these stories and think it's it's happening there and it doesn't affect me it affects you every single time so trauma is the thing I don't think there will be much done in terms of helping survivors of unfoul recover from what's what's before you know what they've experienced but it would seem to me you will have a lot of damaged people you will have a lot of brutalized people as well this doesn't make you a nice person if you've been right through this it it's damaging but there's been no attempt I think a very limited attempt to actually help people resolve mental health problems that have been brought on by by the way they've been treated I'm like a go on and on about trauma it's it's fascinating but it's also painful thank you so I know you are not a policymaker but you have you've you've seen the depth and and and the situation of people that probably policy makers could spend a lifetime and they will not come close to that pain and to the story of those people in this particular context of the azidis and they count I think over 70 rounds of genocide and they're in their history and so the cycle of refreshing their wound seems to to continue but coming to the policy lane and from your observations from your work do you have any particular things that you would like to flag for this audience or for the international community as advice or as asks or as a call of action of sorts I think the difficulty with you know the divisions within the courts that you know these divisions are being augmented very often by the big players in the region and it's very very difficult to do anything unless there is a unity amongst the courts and that they're encouraged to work very closely together to forget the reasons why divisions have have arisen and they they develop a sort of inner unity amongst themselves it's been an age-long problem with the courts where they were fighting for the Ottoman Empire or forking fighting with the Persians with the Safavids they've always been used against each other it's been one persistent and characteristic of what's happened in the Kurdish areas for hundreds of years and it's that for me it's the realization the Kurds themselves have to make that they cannot and should not be divided because the reasons for being Kurdish are so strong that to allow themselves to be divided is an utter, utter mistake and this continual division of the Kurds means that they cannot they won't achieve anything once they achieve unity that will there will be a huge difference but it also means that reconciliation in that region has to be vastly improved I mean it's one community against the other and whether it's Iraq whether it's Iran Turkey you can't have these horrible horrible divisions you can't for example I mean one of the things that we're looking at in this project is what's been happening with Arabization in the Iraqi Kurdish regions you don't need to look very far and you see what is planned for the northern Syrian regions where Kurdish areas where people have been Arabized been kicked out of those areas are now going to be further depopulated and Arabs who've fled to Turkey are going to be brought into there is that a solution that just is going to cement deep deep divisions within these communities you just can't continue doing that Arabization unfile was in fact Arabization people were driven out of their homes and homes destroyed okay they've now repopulated some of the areas but to have this happening in Syria on equal scale is crazy but no one is saying none of the community the outside community is saying anything about it how can you just accept that a leader decides you're going to move all these people out and you're going to bring all these people in when the original inhabitants have lived there first for we don't know how long but for a long long time and this is cruelty gone berserk sorry I'm going on and on now yeah thank you so I'd like to bring in Ambassador Yasin and Mr Rahman basically on to start the conversation with them two points I think both as representatives of the government of Iraq and the Kurdistan regional government ISIS displaced these people the concern the people talk about the concern of ISIS still being there so I'm going to put a two-fold question one in terms of the the film if you have any comments that you particularly want to share but then if I ask you to speak about the threat of ISIS what's the assessment of that threat from the perspective of the government of Iraq and the Kurdistan regional government and if I start with you Ambassador Yasin well the first thing I want to say is thank you Gwyn because this gentleman had been doing this for quite a number of years putting his life at risk to bring out stories that need to be told Dr. Sahang mentioned the cycle of violence we've had in Iraq practically to the day 10 years ago we got a visit from Eric Schmidt to Baghdad who met with Hoshar Zabari and he asked us a question he said what is the worst thing that Saddam left you and we all had our own answer mine was the quelling of the uprising Hoshar's was the unfoul and others was the Iran-Iraq war eventually we dawned on us that Saddam's worst legacy is that he left us a choice of worst legacies but if that question were asked in August or September of 2014 what is the worst thing that has fallen on Iraq then it's the plight of the Yazidis and there's no question that this was the worst thing that we have seen and I have I'm not speaking out of abstract knowledge I spent a couple of years of my life documenting disappeared unfoul victims and like you said it's something that gets at you I think had I not stopped I would have had a massive depression you know going through thousands of names of young people who disappear getting their mothers to donate pictures of their son so that you can document them it's something that grips at you so what do we do well the first thing we do is not forget and that's where I think your work is really really important and we need to do like you said an oral history not only in Iraq in Kurdistan in the neighboring countries but also amongst the far flung Yazidi population there's something that you have to know is that the Kurds in general forgive me if I'm speaking they're still my countrymen but especially the Yazidis are very much attached to their land you know it's a it's a religious attachment they would save money so that if they died in exile they would be sent back to be buried there and one of the most telling things in the development of the Yazidi community in this country is that they consecrated land in the state of Nebraska to make to make a cemetery for themselves in it this is this is a historic decision for a community like this so like I said we have to remember then we have to make sure that this does not happen again and all measures use all measures that you can military intelligence economic international local tribal cultural nothing can be spared to prevent this from happening again it would be it is a blot on Iraq's history that something like this has happened I would be really ashamed if it were to happen again even in in smaller measure then there is something else to be done we have to take care of the survivors and this is not an easy thing ISIS survivors not only the Yazidis but more generally ISIS survivors are of all sorts and don't forget there are children of these communities who were taken and brainwashed and turned into killing machines by ISIS how do you deal with that I mean I really don't know but how do we deal with that I think one has to go back to what the Nazis did to see what how the allies dealt with this to see whether we could come up with solutions that we could be that we could implement on a national scale and then like you said there is issue reconciliation but before that there is the issue of justice and that is something that is being debated at the highest level you know what to do with the ISIS terrorists that did this I hope and pray that we deal with this issue with wisdom and yes with with with compassion for the victims but with with wisdom and intelligence so that we can make sure that it never never never happens again and the threat of ISIS is your assessment you have an assessment of where the threat of ISIS at the moment is it is not zero it is not zero they they have been vanquished territorially but they have sleeper cells and they are vans roving in sparse areas of Iraq that we need to track and control and then eventually one has to pair this in mind this at the basis is an ideological thing and we have to point out to prove to make sure that people know that this is an ideology that is nothing but pure evil thank you ambassador so I'll move to Mr. Rahman but if you have your questions raise your hands and I'll take note and I'll come to you after well first I'd like to thank USIP and the embassy of Germany and the German ambassador for hosting this I think it's excellent and Gwyn we've known you a very long time thank you for all the work that you've done and especially for this film and thank you ambassador for being here I also want to point out that we have some Yazidi friends in the audience and you're very welcome and I can imagine how painful this film was for you as it is for all of us I'll address your question in a moment if I may but I want to say that I've seen this film several times I cry every time I'm hopeless and every time I see new things Gwyn and one of the things I noticed this time and it's so obvious I don't know why I didn't notice it before the little girl from the Chattur family when the family is displaced and they're all talking about what happened to their father how he died and they were sitting by the body and the ISIS fighters were beating the children and so on the little girl never spoke she never spoke the only time she spoke is when she was in Germany and she found her voice and she talked about the fun things that she does as any child her age should and I think that that moment or that realization for me anyway speaks volumes I think the Yazidis have felt that they've had no voice and I hope that if there's any silver lining in this horrendous tragedy of genocide it is that they have found their voice and I want to thank anyone any government any people any NGO any human being that has helped the Yazidis because what they've been through is just unspeakable to answer your question about ISIS from the KRG's perspective we are very concerned about ISIS we believe there are 15 to 20,000 ISIS fighters between Syria and Iraq we're concerned that some of the ISIS fighters escaped the jails or detention camps in Syria when there was a recent incursion by Turkey and a withdrawal backwards or I don't know withdrawal and then an un-withdrawal by the US in that confusion or in that moment some ISIS fighters did escape it only takes one suicide bomber to blow up a room this size so when people say oh it's only a hundred I'm sorry that's a lot of death and destruction that can be created also ISIS is now a global phenomena it's not just an Iraq and Syria I do believe that wherever we are in the world we shouldn't think that we're immune as His Excellency the Ambassador said the ideology is still there and we haven't really I think as a community a world community we haven't successfully come up with a counter narrative to us their narrative is so crazy we can't understand how anyone would fall for it but people do and especially young people vulnerable people angry people marginalized we need to find a counter narrative that deals with that and I think that's where we are that's the point where we can continue to fight ISIS militarily and we need to do that but we really need to also think about the counter narrative that will absolutely defeat their ideology I actually wanted to thank Gwynn for doing one thing that I thought stood out in this movie and that's the indignity of these people you brought that out in a way that cops makes you when I was watching this movie I was trying to think of of similar experiences I had went back many many years ago watching it was us graduate student who watched this movie called the killing fields these were the killing the real killing use that word at that that title I mean some time ago but these were killing fields and I hope we never have killing fields in Iraq again actually in 1991 we did a film which is called the killing fields in on PBS with Kin and Makia yeah so I'll take a couple questions one here in front yes please thank you my name is Mustafa Kesri and I have been working on this situation in Iraq and elsewhere I think the fundamental question that we need to ask is not only about Daesh but also to ask can the political culture in the region generate institutions entities that perfect that that is capable of you know committing such atrocities if you look at the political history of the region in the past 100 years with Armenian genocide with the ethnic cleansing of the Greeks later on I spent six months investigating unfall operations at the beginning of the 90 with Human Rights Watch and then with United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees wherever you go in the world you see Yazidis Kurds you know victims and I hope that's the last time that you know we see such atrocities you know against the Kurds Yazidis minorities and so to speak others but I hope that you know this film which was excellent provokes in us that what causes these institutions to emerge at the first place once in the case of Saddam Hussein it was not in the name of religion it was basic Saddam was not a religious you know did not have a religious government in any case I think that you know we examined the political culture which precipitates you know such such atrocious you know institutions and particularly and also against ethnic and religious minorities thank you thank you can I we'll take another one and then yeah so the back and if I may ask to state your name and if you have a question they're directing it to one of the panelists please state that. I'm FM Koban from American University Washington College of Law thank you SIP for this great opportunity bringing so many people under one roof. My question is to Ambassador Yasin thank you for your earlier presentation Ambassador Yasin as you might recall in the legal adjudication of certain figures of the Bath regime first and foremost Saddam Hussein and chemical Ali against all odds and very strong recommendations by the international legal community not to educate them at national jurisdiction but sort of create a ad hoc international tribunal as was the case for the crimes the Khmer Rouge committed the US or in Yugoslavia or Wanda my question to you is is your government currently considering and adjudicating ISIS fighters at national level and thereby repeating the mistakes because it seems that Iraq does not have the legal capacities to deal with the with the legal cases or does it consider in reaching out and establishing a ad hoc international tribunal thank you we'll take one so one more question and then we'll get to all those in the interest of time yes please oh good afternoon my name is Arlene Harrison I'm a graduate student at Seton Hall University School of Diplomacy I have a question about a statement that you made earlier about the importance of the Kurds unifying and my question is could the exodus the mass exodus of the Syrian Kurds into Iraqi Kurdistan be a silver lining of sorts from the standpoint of eventual unification thank you start with you Gwen on the polar yeah I I just feel that this cycle will continue because what happens I think you know I'm not a real expert on this but it is that the societies and not only the Kurdish society but also Iraqi societies become more and more brutalized and it becomes very difficult to find a way out of this I don't quite know how you break break that line I'm in the Kurds have it the it just it seems to me I don't understand what the process would need to be to bring a hold to it it's all right having lofty words and saying yes we need reconciliation and and so on it doesn't work there needs to be some definite period of sort of converse I don't quite know convalescence it seems almost impossible it's almost as for me as if the region is damned to repeat itself all over again and you mentioned with the azidis I mean there seem to have been 70 or more genocides I mean that's just incredible and it's still happening so what what's wrong with the azidis now I can tell you that even in Kurdistan there was a lot of discrimination against the azidis so Kurds themselves need to identify what they think of the azidi community and come to terms with the bad thoughts that they have but also from the azidi side as well there's quite a painful process I think involved anyway sorry and to the last question about unifying the Kurds do you have a comment on that is is the syrian I think the whole unity thing is very very complex I think barn is better qualified than I am to to answer that as a politician ambassador as seen on the tribunal question this is a very topical question it's being discussed it was discussed at the general assembly in the United Nations and it was recently discussed as an anti-isis conference just recently the position of the Iraqi government is the following we will take in Iraqi ISIS fighters and we will judge them we will take in also Iraqis who are relatives of ISIS fighters not to judge them but to see whether we can reintegrate them in in ways that have been done before the example of Columbia stands out you know that it's a long process very costly process what is an issue between different countries is what to do with foreign fighters and there are many several thousand coming from more than 50 countries our position is that this is this should be dealt with by their home states some countries have argued that they should be judged near where the crime their crimes were committed but in terms of the capacities of the Iraqi state this is a really really difficult thing to do imagine for example some ISIS fighter who is responsible for killing I don't know God and God knows how many people and he gets judged and then assuming we won't be able to use the death penalty he gets a successive term three terms of 30 years each who's going to deal with that where will you put him it's from just justice point of view from a logistical point of view it's really really difficult one example that I could mention is a German case where now you have invoked a universal jurisdiction to apply to apply German laws to torsioners in Syria could this be extended to ISIS fighters I don't know that's a question for the legal experts to answer thank you thank you thank you for what you've done this was wonderful so the question about Kurdish unity or unification I should say that his excellency Sefin Dazei the KRG head of foreign relations is here so perhaps he has a better answer I'll have a go but you're welcome to correct oh yes so I think there are two levels of unity or unification we can talk about when we talk about the Kurds first there are the four borders or the four countries that we've been divided into Turkey Iran Iraq and Syria and I always like to boast that I have relatives in all four parts of Kurdistan maybe it's a dream for Kurds that all four parts will unify but it's very very unrealistic but that's maybe something that people dream about and write poems about but the other kind of unity and I think perhaps this is what Gwyn was referring to is more internal unity he's right sadly and I've said this before in public as well our disunity is actually our worst enemy we have on the one hand we have in Iraqi Kurdistan a healthy level of democracy of course it can always be improved but we have a parliament we have different parties the elections are contested very what's the word in a lively way we have elections and so on but we also have a level of disunity that undermines our position whether it's within Iraq whether it's on an international platform and I agree with Gwyn and many other friends and many of us Kurds who believe this we need to be much more united because the Kurds are ethnically cleansed we are the victims of genocide we are the victims in the killing fields in many parts of the world and it doesn't seem to come to an end so I think unity has to be our way forward Gwyn if I may just add one thing one of the things that we're looking at is cultural erasure and this has been in many instances systematic so it's hardly surprising that Kurds are disunited when their language has been attacked their art has been attacked their music their dancing everything at various stages has been an attempt to actually try and erase it and is it surprising that there are problems about unity their most fundamental thing about being Kurdish is the Kurdish culture which is really strong but if countries around you have been trying to to banish it to to destroy it then that will have a knock on effect culture is at the heart of the problem there is a new development that didn't exist even 20 or 30 years ago and that is the issue of the diaspora we now have I'm speaking from an Iraqi perspective a very important and growing Iraqi diaspora and of course a very important and growing Kurdish diaspora and Bayan and I are you know members of each you know so so I think one way of trying to resolve these issues and and tamp down on differences and to try to get some sort of common cause going along is to see whether we can further integrate and bring together the various diasporas with their home countries to see whether we can feed off each other in in a sort of virtuous cycle that would help avoid erasure and enrich the cultures that we that we that we originally came from thank you unfortunately we have come to the end of our time and probably we passed it by a few minutes I mean as the film is showing us has shown us this conversation the earlier remarks and what that we see what we see from the work of USIP on the ground the work of other organizations the work is not done the 300,000 people still displaced unable to go home and all the challenges that we are facing it is a true testament that the work is not done and the fact I think that we need to recognize that even the active genocide is not complete because the ISIS may have been removed as a terror in terms of holding territory but the effect of what they have done did not stop with the killings and the displacement right now with those people displaced their future still uncertain and I coming back from the region there is even a yet another layer of complexity where the especially the people of Sinjar and the surrounding areas are concerned about the developments in Turkey and if the Turkish incursion could happen and destabilize their area further so this work is not done and it is important for us to continue in closing I would like to thanks again to express my thanks again to the German embassy and to the Kurdistan regional government for partnering with us to co-sponsor this event and I would like to thank Ambassador Yasin and Representative Abdurrahman for their time and for their comments but really special thanks to you Mr. Roberts for the excellent film for traveling such a long distance to be with us today for the rich comments but most importantly for this for the service of capturing the tragedy of this family and what these communities are going through you don't get that kind of quality every day I think the movie in the film was rich in content that will stay with us and it has plenty of material for all of us to unpack and process and see what we can do to help the families like the Chattur family communities like the Yazidi community and victims of conflict and and extremism in general so I appreciate that you stayed with us at this later hour so please thank me join me in thanking our panelists today