In a remarkable twist of fate, nearly 300 black-and-white photographs taken in the 1930s of Iraq’s Yazidi community have resurfaced, offering a window into a world that the Islamic State (IS) tried so desperately to erase. These images, long forgotten in the archives of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, are now at the heart of a project reconnecting Yazidi descendants with a history many thought lost forever.
The story begins in northern Iraq, where archeologists studying ancient Mesopotamian civilizations befriended the local Yazidis and documented their daily lives. According to the Associated Press, these photographs were originally scattered among some 2,000 images from the ambitious excavations led by the Penn Museum in the early 20th century. For decades, the images lay dormant, a silent testament to a vibrant culture and community.
That changed in 2022, when Marc Marin Webb, a doctoral student at the University of Pennsylvania, stumbled upon a photo of a Yazidi shrine that had been destroyed by IS militants nearly a decade earlier. This discovery set off a painstaking search through the museum’s archives, resulting in the assembly of a visual archive that now includes almost 300 photographs. The effort, as Webb told the Associated Press, was nothing short of a "beautiful way to bring memory back, a memory that was directly threatened through the ethnic cleansing campaign."
The significance of these photos cannot be overstated. The Yazidis, one of Iraq’s oldest religious minorities, have endured centuries of persecution, but the 2014 attacks by the Islamic State were especially brutal. The United Nations has called these attacks a genocide, with thousands of Yazidis killed, thousands more forced into exile or sexual slavery, and much of their built heritage and cultural artifacts destroyed. The community, once centered in places like Sinjar and Bashiqa near Mosul, is now scattered across the globe.
For individuals like Ansam Basher, a 43-year-old teacher now living in England, the rediscovered photos have been deeply emotional. Among the archive was a batch 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 said, reflecting on the loss of her family’s albums, childhood photos, and wedding videos when Bashiqa fell to IS in 2014. "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. Everybody is."
The archive, curated by Webb and Nathaniel Brunt, a Toronto-based documentarian and postdoctoral student at the University of Victoria Libraries, does more than just preserve images. It documents Yazidi people, places, and traditions that IS sought to erase. Brunt described the project as a "very strong resistance against that act of destruction," noting that when IS militants reached Sinjar, they systematically destroyed religious and heritage sites in an attempt to wipe out Yazidi memory.
Sharing this visual trove with the Yazidi community has become a mission. The first exhibits took place in April 2025, coinciding with Yazidi New Year celebrations. Some of these exhibits were held outdoors, in the very places depicted in the nearly century-old photographs—a poignant reunion of past and present. When Basher’s brother, visiting from Germany, recognized their grandparents in the exhibit, it helped researchers fill in missing details about the family’s history. The wedding photos, for instance, show an elaborately dressed bride standing anxiously in her doorway, proceeding with her dowry to her husband’s village, and finally entering his family home as a crowd looks on. "I see my sister in black and white," Basher said, noting the striking resemblance between her sister and their grandmother, Naama Sulayman.
Basher’s grandfather, Bashir Sadiq Rashid al-Rashidani, played a central role in this story. A member of a prominent family, he often hosted the Penn archaeology crews at his café in Bashiqa. He and his brother, like many local men, worked on the excavations and invited the westerners to his wedding. The Penn team, in turn, took photographs of the event and even lent the couple a car—a 1927 model, which Basher’s father, Mohsin Bashir Sadiq, believes was the first ever used in the town. The car is visible at the back of the wedding procession in the photos, a symbol of a unique moment in local history.
Some of the photographs were taken by Ephraim Avigdor Speiser, the Penn Museum archaeologist who led the excavations at Tepe Gawra and Tell Billa, two ancient Mesopotamian sites. Basher’s father, now 77 and living in Cologne, Germany, remembers his own father’s stories about those days. "My grandfather used to talk a lot about that time," Basher recalled, using a different spelling of the family surname than some relatives.
The project’s reach extends far beyond one family. Basher has shared the photos on social media, hoping to educate others about Yazidi history and culture. "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." Other photos in the collection show Yazidis at home, at work, and at religious gatherings—scenes that counter the prevailing narrative of violence and loss with one of resilience and everyday life.
The Yazidis, who speak Kurdish and whose traditions borrow from Christianity, Islam, and the ancient Persian religion of Zoroastrianism, have long been misunderstood. Many Muslim sects consider them infidels, and some Iraqis have falsely labeled them as Satan worshippers. Despite this, the community has endured, and the rediscovered photographs serve as a powerful reminder of their humanity and heritage. Locals who attended the exhibits told Webb that the project "shows the world that we’re also people."
The archival work itself was a collaborative effort. Alessandro Pezzati, the museum’s senior archivist, played a key role in helping identify the photos. "A lot of these collections are sleeping until they get woken up by people like him," Pezzati said, referring to Webb’s determination to bring the images into the light.
For the Yazidis, these photographs are more than just relics—they are a bridge to a past that extremists tried to annihilate. As the community continues to rebuild and redefine itself in the aftermath of genocide, the visual archive stands as a testament to survival, memory, and the enduring power of family and tradition.