"They Came to Destroy": ISIS Crimes Against the Yazidis

"They Came to Destroy": ISIS Crimes Against the Yazidis, issued by the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic under the United Nations Human Rights Council in June 2016, is the UN's own formal investigative report documenting the Islamic State's campaign against the Yazidi religious minority in Iraq and Syria beginning in 2014, which the report concludes constitutes genocide. Its strength is that it is a UN commission report built from witness testimony gathered by an international investigative body with a specific human rights mandate, carrying the evidentiary weight of that process. Its limit is that it is an advocacy and investigative document aimed at documenting atrocity for accountability purposes rather than a scholarly ethnography of Yazidi religion itself, so a claim about Yazidi theology or ritual practice, as opposed to the documented crimes against the community, needs a source examining the religion on its own terms.