to go to heaven. This religious man is a very well known religious leader and gives a speech every week in mosque that is being attended by a large number of youths who interact with Yazidies during their daily life. Minorities know that at some point- ISIS will leave their areas but the problem is that these crimes and the last events go beyond the issue of ISIS. The problem has its roots in the way local people are seeing them, these are the reasons that made some of the local people act like ISIS did against them. At some point there have been some attempts made by minorities to address this hatred against them, but because of having no mechanisms to address this hatred and the violations of their rights, what started as discrimination, turned into incidents of violence and then gradually turned into bigger crimes, and it has reached a point when it has become a ‘sleeping power against minorities’ that can be turned into action whenever there is an opportunity, like the one presented by ISIS. On the other hand, the education curriculum does not include teaching of the history, culture and traditions of the minorities. The ignorance and lack of knowledge about minorities is widespread in the country. Many people don’t know Yazidies, the content of their/our religion, their/our culture. At the same time there are community leaders spreading the culture of hatred against certain minorities…. The ignorance plus the hatred based on incorrect picture about minorities, both work together in making local people to turn against them, and discriminate, and violate the rights of minorities. Indeed, if we look at the earlier stages of the situation that led to the current situation of minorities, we will find that people belonging to minority communities were being discriminated against on a daily basis in schools, universities, and many aspects of public life. Minorities were not able to counter the discrimination that they were subjected to every day. It has created an environment where minorities ’accepted’ that they were being discriminated. The discrimination (I would call it the early stage of the crimes and atrocities witnessed in Iraq today) wasn’t solved at the early stages because there was no mechanism to counter it, crimes