targeting minorities were not addressed and this gradually turned into atrocity crimes against them. In addition to all of these, the lack of participation of minorities in public life was another aspect that facilitated / made it possible to have violence and atrocities targeting minorities. If there was adequate participation of Yazidies in the security forces existing in their areas, the level of the atrocities probably would have been much lower and many families would have been saved. There wasn’t any sympathy, by the forces, toward minorities, therefore many families were abandoned and left in the hands of ISIS. If there the security forces and military had tried to counter ISIS, it would have given families a few more hours to escape, and thousands of the kidnapped Yazidies would have had time to reach the mountain to survive from the ISIS. Ladies and gentlemen, the society in Iraq still has the trends of a clan based and religious based society. When it comes to religious hate crimes, there is always impunity. When a thirteen years old Yazidi girl was kidnapped, there was no proper investigation into the case since the government treated the case with much caution as it did not wanted to be seen being weak in front of a certain religious group. More than a year after the incident, no one knew where the investigations led to, and no results were shown for the case. These have made it more likely for these kinds of crimes to happen again. Let’s not forget that the civil society is playing a very strong role in Iraq in challenging the violations of rights of minorities but mechanisms to address these violations are non-existent. The nonexistence of anti-discrimination law and lack of mechanisms to counter hatred makes challenging discrimination very difficult. We believe that if there were such mechanisms, it would have made the minority activists much stronger in addressing these violations and advocating for their rights. It would have created a very cooperative environment between government and civil society in dealing with these crimes. An anti-discrimination law and its