Prayer cloths on Mount Arafat in the Yezidi holy site of Lalish, Kurdistan Region. Picture by Levi Clancy. Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0.The imminent liberation of Mosul offers the international community a unique opportunity. It is an opportunity to take concrete, concerted legal action: to permit the region’s most vulnerable minorities to exercise self-preservation and self-determination by forming an autonomous, pluralistic province in the area known as the Nineveh Plains, their historic homeland in the northwest reaches of Mesopotamia.
Such a territorial initiative would, of course, be fraught with dangers and disadvantages, which any viable plan must take into consideration. It must not be a unilateral effort, especially by the United States, or perceived to be such. This must not be another American interventionist, nation-building exercise.
Earlier this year, the European Parliament, the Council of Europe, the British Parliament, and the United States Congress all formally recognized that the Islamic State (ISIS) has waged an ongoing campaign of genocide against Christians, Yezidis, and other ethnic minorities in Iraq and Syria. This resounding international designation of Islamic State’s atrocities as genocide is momentous. Under the terms of the United Nations’ Genocide Convention of 1948, states must ‘undertake to prevent and to punish’ genocide. Prevention of genocide can take real, substantial form in the creation of a protected province in the Nineveh Plains, even if that province is federated and remains dependent on Baghdad to some degree.
