Eyewitness to a Massacre
DANA PITTARD
August 2014
As the senior commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, part of my job was to oversee the surveillance and reconnaissance of ISIS and to gather intelligence on them. Later our operations center would serve a far more lethal role—but not on this day.
On August 3, I watched our Predator drone feed display a gut-wrenching live video that haunts me to this day. The Predator was flying over the village of Qiniyeh near Sinjar, southwest of Mosul in Iraq. We’d been checking out the village of Qiniyeh by drone only by chance because we had intelligence reports that top ISIS leader Abu Bakr might be there with some of his fighters. The village was home to an Iraqi religious minority group known as the Yazidi.
The Yazidi, who had once numbered around half a million in northern Iraq, had long been persecuted for following an ancient faith that had elements of Islam, Zoroastrianism, and Christianity. They believed that God created a world ruled by seven angels. Some Muslims considered it to be a form of devil worship. We’d heard scattered reports of the ISIS terrorist army slaughtering thousands of Yazidi civilians, but hadn’t yet confirmed any of them.
We watched the drone feed as ISIS fighters armed with machine guns, rifles, and handguns rounded up several hundred residents in the center of the village. The terrorist fighters marched the civilians to the outskirts of town. (As we later learned, ISIS had demanded all residents convert to Islam—their typical ploy.)
The ISIS fighters separated the Yazidi men from the women and children. They escorted the women and children to a group of vehicles and separated them before loading them up and driving off. We suspected that the women and girls would be forced into sex slavery or marriage, and that the boys would be forced into slavery or made to join the ISIS army. 1 If they refused either, they would be killed.
After the women and children were driven off from the village, the ISIS fighters handed out shovels to the group of about eighty Yazidi men. They ordered the group, at gunpoint, to dig a long trench at the edge of town. I asked my staff if they thought it might be some sort of defensive trench that ISIS was forcing the Yazidi men to dig in order to shore up their defenses. I knew deep down, though, that the ditch was probably meant for a far more nefarious purpose. Our intelligence officer, Lieutenant Colonel John Barnett, confirmed my worst fears. He said the Yazidi men were likely being forced to dig their own graves.
Our mission in Iraq was solely to “advise and assist” our coalition allies consisting primarily of the Iraqi Security Forces and Kurdish Peshmerga troops. We were prohibited from engaging ISIS on the ground or from the air unless in direct self-defense of U.S. forces. Still, holding on to the faint hope that I could get permission to go against our limited rules of engagement if it meant stopping a slaughter, I asked my JTACs if we had any fighter aircraft overhead near the area.
The answer was no.
Once the men finished their trench, we watched grimly as the ISIS fighters lined them up near it. They took aim with their machine guns and opened fire. Once the smoke and dust settled, we could see clearly that ISIS had executed all eighty men.2
Those of us watching were all combat veterans. Most had seen a lot of combat, yet we were all sickened by what we saw. It was pure religious fanaticism—not an act of war. The unarmed Yazidi were no threat to the ISIS fighters. It was genocide, clear and simple.
After slaughtering the Yazidi villagers, the ISIS murderers kicked and dragged their bodies into the trench. It was a horrific scene of brutality. It made me even more frustrated and angry about our severely limited rules of engagement. Despite all the military might at my control, I stood helpless and unable to stop the barbaric acts that unfolded before our eyes.
Angry and disgusted by our inability to act, I called my commander in Kuwait, Lieutenant General James Terry, and let him know my feelings.
“Sir, did you just see the mass execution of the Yazidi men on your drone feeds there?”
Terry replied solemnly. He had not yet seen the slaughter, but he’d heard about it.
“We cannot stand by and allow this to happen again,” I said. “Sir, we have to get permission to intervene.”
He agreed and told me that he would speak with “the boss” at CENTCOM—our commander General Austin. A few hours later, LTG Terry called me back to pass word that we were authorized to intervene with airpower to prevent future mass killings.
Unfortunately, we never saw another opportunity to stop a mass execution—even though the slaughter we witnessed that day marked the beginning of an ISIS rampage that would leave tens of thousands of Yazidi dead and force more than 200,000 to flee to Sinjar Mountain in northern Iraq.3
We would soon be able to stop ISIS in other ways, though.
1 Cathy Otten, “Slaves of Isis: the long walk of the Yazidi women,” The Guardian, July 25, 2017, accessed April 24, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jul/25/slaves-of-isis-the-long-walk-of-the-yazidi-women.
2 “Iraq Crisis: Yazidi villagers ‘massacred’ by IS,” BBC News, August 16, 2014, accessed April 24, 2018, http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-28814633.
3 Martin Chulov, “40,000 Iraqis stranded on mountain as Isis jihadists threaten death,” The Guardian, August 6, 2014, accessed April 24, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/aug/07/40000-iraqis-stranded-mountain-isis-death-threat.