Findings on Record, and Why the Atlas Keeps the Entry

A reference work that covers religion has to decide what to do with a movement whose religious claims were rejected by the tradition it claimed. Omitting it would leave the rejection unexplained and would remove from the record the documents in which Muslim scholars set out what a caliphate is and is not. Including it risks reading as endorsement. The atlas takes the first risk and states the reason here.

The findings of others are recorded as theirs. The Independent International Commission of Inquiry established by the United Nations Human Rights Council reported in 2016, in a document titled They Came to Destroy, that the group's campaign against the Yazidi population of Sinjar from August 2014 constituted genocide, and set out the evidence on which it reached that conclusion. The Republic of Iraq subsequently enacted the Yazidi Female Survivors Law, which recognises the crimes and provides for reparations. Independent demographic work published in a medical journal produced estimates of those killed and taken captive. Those are the findings of a United Nations commission, of a national legislature and of academic researchers respectively, and they are cited as such.

The atlas holds the entry as a record of claims made and answered. It does not present the group's religious assertions as accepted by any body of Muslim scholarship, because they were not.