Broken Promises of Compensation for Sinjaris
Sinjar has been the site of grave war crimes and mass displacement going back a decade, with about 183,000 Sinjaris still displaced today. Yet despite years of waiting, not a single person from Sinjar has received the compensation payments that they are entitled to under Iraqi law for destruction of and damage to their property, we found a year ago.
80 percent of public infrastructure and 70 percent of homes in Sinjar Town were destroyed during the conflict against ISIS between 2014 and 2017. Without this compensation, many displaced Sinjaris lack the financial means to go home and rebuild the homes and businesses lost during the war. A decade on, tens of thousands of Sinjaris are still living in camps across the Kurdistan Region of Iraq and largely reliant on humanitarian assistance. As the federal government’s July 30 deadline for closing these camps looms near, delivering these payments becomes even more important.
As of a year ago, 3,500 completed compensation claims were awaiting payment from the Ninewa Governorate’s Finance Department. That number has now risen to 10,000, and still not a single payment has been made, a representative of the Sinjar compensation office told Human Rights Watch.
The office has processed another 26,000 claims that are waiting for final approval from the appeals court before sending them to the Finance Department for payment, the representative said.
“We finished processing all the cases filed between 2021 and 2023, so there is no more backlog,” Judge Ammar Mohammed, head of the Tel Afar Compensation Committee, which oversees the Sinjar sub-office, told me. “We’ve done our job. It’s now the government’s job to pay.”
