In a remarkable twist of fate, a cache of forgotten photographs from the 1930s has become a lifeline for Iraq’s Yazidi community, whose history and heritage were nearly wiped out by the Islamic State’s campaign of terror. The black-and-white images, rediscovered at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, are now being carefully assembled into a visual archive, bringing to light a chapter of Yazidi life that extremists had tried to erase.
According to the Associated Press, these photographs were originally taken by archaeologists studying ancient civilizations in northern Iraq. During their ambitious excavations, the researchers befriended the local Yazidi community, documenting their daily routines, traditions, and celebrations in a series of candid images. Over time, the photos became scattered among some 2,000 excavation images stored at the university’s museum, quietly gathering dust and awaiting rediscovery.
The story of this archival resurrection began in 2022, when Marc Marin Webb, a doctoral student at the University of Pennsylvania, stumbled upon a photo of a Yazidi shrine. The image was especially poignant: the shrine had been destroyed nearly a decade earlier by Islamic State militants, who swept through the region in a campaign the United Nations later called a genocide. This moment of recognition set Webb and his colleagues on a mission to comb through the museum’s files, ultimately gathering nearly 300 photos that now form the backbone of the Yazidi visual archive.
The archive is more than just a collection of old pictures. It stands as a testament to the resilience of one of Iraq’s oldest religious minorities, whose members have endured centuries of persecution. The systematic attacks by the Islamic State, which began in 2014, killed thousands of Yazidis and forced many more into exile or sexual slavery. The militants also obliterated much of the Yazidis’ built heritage and cultural history, splintering the once-cohesive community across the globe.
For Ansam Basher, a 43-year-old teacher now living in England, the archive has been both a balm and a revelation. She was overwhelmed with emotion when she first saw a batch of photos from her grandparents’ wedding day in the early 1930s. “No one would imagine that a person my age would lose their history because of the ISIS attack,” Basher told France 24. Her family had lived in Bashiqa, a town near Mosul that fell to the Islamic State in 2014. In the chaos, Basher lost cherished family albums, childhood photos, and wedding videos—memories that, she feared, were gone forever. “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.”
The wedding photos themselves tell a vivid story. In one, an elaborately dressed bride stands anxiously in the doorway of her home, preparing to proceed with her dowry to her husband’s village. In another, she enters her new family’s home as a crowd looks on—a scene brimming with anticipation and tradition. Basher noted striking physical similarities between her sister and their grandmother, Naama Sulayman, captured in the images: “I see my sister in black and white,” she remarked, pointing out their shared green eyes and skin tone.
Basher’s grandfather, Bashir Sadiq Rashid al-Rashidani, came from a prominent family in the region. He often hosted the Penn archaeology crews at his cafe and, along with his brother, worked on the excavations. The archaeologists were so warmly welcomed that they were invited to the family wedding, where they took many of the now-rediscovered photos. They even lent the couple a car—described by Basher’s father, Mohsin Bashir Sadiq, as a 1927 model—which appears at the back of the wedding procession. According to Basher’s father, who is now a retired teacher living in Cologne, Germany, it was likely the first time a car had ever been used in their town.
Some of the photos were taken by Ephraim Avigdor Speiser, the archaeologist who led the Penn Museum’s excavations at the ancient Mesopotamian sites of Tepe Gawra and Tell Billa. These images, along with others showing Yazidis at home, at work, and at religious gatherings, offer a window into a world that might otherwise have been lost. For Webb, an architect from Barcelona, the photos are a powerful counterpoint to the violence that later engulfed the Yazidi people. “They show the Yazidis as they lived, instead of equating them with the violence they later endured,” he explained.
The rediscovered archive has not remained hidden in the museum’s vaults. Webb and Nathaniel Brunt, a Toronto-based documentarian and postdoctoral student at the University of Victoria Libraries, have been working to share the collection with the Yazidi community. According to Brunt, “When they came to Sinjar, they went around and destroyed all the religious and heritage sites, so these photographs in themselves present a very strong resistance against that act of destruction.” The city of Sinjar, near the Syrian border, is the ancestral homeland of the Yazidis and was a major target during the Islamic State’s campaign.
In April 2025, the first exhibitions of the archive took place in the region, coinciding with the Yazidi New Year celebrations. Some of these exhibits were held outdoors, in the very locations depicted in the nearly century-old photos. Webb described the experience as “a beautiful way to bring memory back, a memory that was directly threatened through the ethnic cleansing campaign.” For many Yazidis, including Basher’s brother—who was visiting from Germany and recognized their grandparents in the exhibit—the photos have filled in long-missing details about their family and community.
The reaction from the Yazidi community has been overwhelmingly positive. Locals who viewed the exhibit told Webb that it “shows the world that we’re also people.” For a group that has often been defined by its suffering, the archive offers a different narrative—one rooted in daily life, resilience, and continuity. Basher has even shared the photos on social media, hoping to educate others and challenge misconceptions about her homeland. “The idea or the picture they have in their mind about Iraq is so different from the reality,” she said. “We’ve been suffering a lot, but we still have some history.”
Behind the scenes, the work of assembling the archive has relied on the dedication of museum staff like Alessandro Pezzati, the senior archivist at the Penn Museum. Pezzati helped Webb comb through the files to identify the Yazidi photos and emphasized the ongoing importance of such discoveries. “A lot of these collections are sleeping until they get woken up by people like him,” Pezzati observed.
For the Yazidis, a community isolated and persecuted for centuries, the archive is more than a historical record—it’s a form of cultural resistance and a bridge to the future. The images, once nearly lost to time, now serve as a powerful reminder that even in the aftermath of destruction, memory endures and identity persists.