Kite-flying Yazidis trained to film genocide sites

A team of British-based architects is to teach Yazidi volunteers how to document the sites of genocide by Isis in Iraq using kites and helium balloons.

The groundbreaking project will record the kill sites and places of sexual enslavement scattered across the Sinjar region, enabling locations to be rendered as accurate 3D models and linked to survivors’ testimonies. It is intended to prepare the way for prosecutions.

It will be the first attempt to create a permanent record of the atrocities and will be carried out mostly from the air, flying kites and helium balloons equipped with small cameras above the mines and booby-traps that characterise former Islamic State territory.

The architects, plus the odd software developer, lawyer, photographer and archaeologist, are based at Goldsmiths, University of London, in southeast London. Now 15-strong, Forensic Architecture, as the organisation is known, was set up by Eyal Weizman, a British-Israeli professor at the university, in 2010, and has an impressive track record. In 2017 they proved that a German intelligence agent could not have failed to witness the 2006 murder of a Turkish café owner by neo-Nazis in Kassel, as claimed, leading to the exposure of a cover-up by his employers.

They analysed the clouds of debris created when 2,000 Israeli bombs, missiles and shells landed on Rafah, in the Gaza strip, enabling investigators to determine that the Israelis were running a classified policy, since cancelled, of attempting to kill captured soldiers instead of letting them become hostages, no matter the civilian casualties. They have also showed collusion between the local police and organised crime in the 2014 disappearance of 43 student protesters in Ayotzinapa, Mexico, investigated a lethal factory fire in Karachi and recreated Syria’s Saydnaya torture camp from the memories of survivors.

Training for the Yazidi operation has already begun in Turkey and Forensic Architecture will work alongside Yazda, an organisation set up by the Yazidi diaspora to support survivors.

“Many times Isis didn’t even bury people and there are still bodies lying around,” Ariel Caine, the project coordinator, said. “So there are disturbances by wild animals, by the wind, the weather. The sites are often booby-trapped as well as disintegrating so access by image is really the only option. This will be the only accurate archive but one that can be examined outside the region.”

The V&A has chosen the project to represent Britain at the London Design Biennale, an international arts festival at Somerset House. “By getting the story out there and showing the violence inflicted, hopefully we can put pressure on governments and the United Nations to fund investigations,” Mr Caine said. “It would be nice to think some of the perpetrators of these war crimes will be brought to account.”