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When the so-called “Islamic State” (IS) attacked Iraq’s Nineveh Governorate, the region’s religious minorities became victims of genocide and displacement. This chapter focuses on the region of Sinjar (Kurdish: Şingal) and the displacement of the Yazidi (Kurdish: Êzîdî) along with other religious minorities living there. The displacement of these groups directly resulted from their vulnerability as religious minorities. IS targeted them as religious minorities, and their current problems as internally displaced persons (IDPs) also resulted from their status as relatively small communities without a historically strong political lobby or military force. This chapter analyzes the living conditions and political framework in which these IDPs and refugees must survive and presents their personal perspectives from inside and outside of Iraq. Interviews were centered on the following questions: What conditions prevent Yazidi, Christians, and other groups from returning to Sinjar? What are their perspectives on building a future in the region? What would they need in order to return and rebuild their homes? And how do the displaced adherents of the different religious groups interpret the 2014 genocide within a longer history of perceived genocidal acts against religious minorities in the area?

Historians of the modern Middle East have long been concerned with the politics of identity, community and sect. The history of modern Syria remains bound up with the problematic of diversity and difference, most commonly explored in terms of minorities and sectarianism. In order to better understand struggles to describe, understand and master both categories and practices of minority and sect in the context of modern Syria, this chapter considers a variety of discourses on the Alawi community during the French Mandate and early independence periods. Scholarly discussion of sectarianism in modern Syria may run the risk of reifying sectarian identities, practices and modes of imagination. But this liability should not obviate the imperative to think through the significance of particular events, individuals or moments in modern Syrian history as well as to call into question nationalist, sectarianist, communitarian and other forms of historiographical, political and intellectual discourse that touch upon issues pertaining to the sectarian. The point of such critical analysis would be neither to uncritically reproduce earlier “mosaicist” or “sectarianist” approaches to the study of modern Syria — indeed, it is precisely such methodological lenses that have obfuscated some of the most interesting and complex historical realities there — nor simply to reduce Syrians to their ascriptive sectarian affiliations. One may hope that broader engagements with the genealogies of sectarianism in modern Syria may yet contribute to a more capacious and less conflictual understanding of Syrian difference and diversity.