Iraq’s Yazidis rediscover lost history through photos found in a museum archive
PHILADELPHIA (AP) — Archeologists studying ancient civilizations in northern Iraq during the 1930s also befriended the nearby Yazidi community, documenting their daily lives in photographs that were rediscovered after the Islamic State militant group devastated the tiny religious minority.
The black-and-white images ended up scattered among the 2,000 or so photographs from the excavation kept at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, which led the ambitious dig.
University of Pennsylvania doctoral student Marc Marin Webb displays an image from a collection of photos of the Yazidi people in their northern Iraq homeland in the 1930s, at the Penn Museum Archives in Philadelphia, Aug. 27, 2025. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)
University of Pennsylvania doctoral student Marc Marin Webb displays an image from a collection of photos of the Yazidi people in their northern Iraq homeland in the 1930s, at the Penn Museum Archives in Philadelphia, Aug. 27, 2025. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)
One photo — a Yazidi shrine — caught the eye of Penn doctoral student Marc Marin Webb in 2022, nearly a decade after it was destroyed by IS extremists plundering the region. Webb and others began scouring museum files and gathered almost 300 photos to create a visual archive of the Yazidi people, one of Iraq’s oldest religious minorities.
The systematic attacks, which the United Nations called a genocide, killed thousands of Yazidis and sent thousands more into exile or sexual slavery. It also destroyed much of their built heritage and cultural history, and the small community has since become splintered around the world.
Ansam Basher, now a teacher in England, was overwhelmed with emotion when she saw the photos, particularly a batch from her grandparents’ wedding day in the early 1930s.
University of Pennsylvania doctoral student Marc Marin Webb, left, and University of Victoria postdoctoral fellow Nathaniel Brunt, view images of photos of the Yazidi people in their northern Iraq homeland in the 1930s, during an interview at the Penn Museum Archives in Philadelphia, Aug. 27, 2025. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)
University of Pennsylvania doctoral student Marc Marin Webb, left, and University of Victoria postdoctoral fellow Nathaniel Brunt, view images of photos of the Yazidi people in their northern Iraq homeland in the 1930s, during an interview at the Penn Museum Archives in Philadelphia, Aug. 27, 2025. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)
“No one would imagine that a person my age would lose their history because of the ISIS attack,” said the 43-year-old, using an acronym for the extremist group. Basher’s grandfather lived with her family while she was growing up in Bashiqa, a town outside Mosul. The city fell to IS in 2014.
“My albums, my childhood photos, all videos, my two brothers’ wedding videos (and) photos, disappeared. And now to see that my grandfather and great-grandfather’s photo all of a sudden just come to life again, this is something I’m really happy about,” she said. “Everybody is.”