Qasim Shesho (Kurdish: Qasim Şeşo; born 1953) is a Yazidi military commander in Sinjar (Şingal), northern Iraq. He commands a Yazidi Peshmerga force affiliated with the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and is widely known by the honorific "the Lion of Sinjar" or "Old Tiger of Mount Sinjar" for organizing local resistance against the Islamic State (IS) at the Sharfadin temple in August 2014, during the Yazidi genocide. He is the uncle of fellow Yazidi commander Haydar Shesho.
Personal life Qasim Shesho was born 1953 in the village of Rashid near Sharfadin temple in the Sinjar district of Nineveh Governorate, Iraq.
Shesho is a member of the Shesho family, a prominent Yazidi family from the Sinjar region. The Shesho family traces its origins to the small village of Raşîd, which stood in the hills behind the Şerfedîn shrine until it was abandoned; the village's local shrine was that of Hacalî.Raßbach 2024, p. 293. The family holds the traditional tribal status of agha (chieftain), and land around the present-day Şerfedîn shrine is still considered to belong to the Sheshos; Qasim, as head of the family, has reportedly distributed land there to displaced Yazidis returning to the area.
Shesho has been a member of the Kurdistan Democratic Party and an honored Peshmerga commander since the 1970s. After the collapse of the Kurdish uprising against the Ba'athist government in 1975, he led the Yazidi-Kurdish resistance in Sinjar from a hideout across the border in Syria.
Numerous stories about Shesho's exploits during this period circulate in Sinjar. According to an account from his son Haval, Shesho once stormed a Ba'athist military outpost near the Çil Mêra shrine and telephoned the Iraqi army post at Tel Afar to declare that he had killed everyone there and was coming for them next, prompting the local commander to abandon his post; Shesho is said to have gone on to destroy all four Iraqi army outposts then stationed around the Şerfedîn shrine.
He was imprisoned by Iraqi authorities in Mosul between 1974 and 1979, until a general amnesty secured his release. Throughout the 1980s he crossed on foot between Syria and the Sinjar Mountain, reportedly with the support of the Syrian government under Hafez al-Assad. In 1981, he fled Sinjar together with his wife and children to escape Saddam Hussein's forces, initially settling in Syria. The Syrian government granted the Shesho family asylum in 1982.
Historian Thomas Schmidinger relates that when an Iraqi intelligence officer travelled to Syria to negotiate Shesho's return to Iraq, Shesho shot him.
In 1989 the family emigrated again, this time to West Germany, eventually settling in Bad Oeynhausen, where the family obtained German citizenship. Shesho worked as a gardener/landscaper. He vowed to return to Sinjar only after Saddam Hussein's fall.
He returned to Iraq after the fall of the Ba'athist government in 2003 and continued his involvement with Peshmerga forces in the Sinjar area. He came back in 2004 in a triumphal procession of one hundred men.
Shesho has several sons, some of whom joined him in Iraq to fight alongside his forces, traveling from Germany to help defend the Sharfadin shrine in 2014, and one of his sons was quoted anonymously by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in 2015 discussing the Kurdistan Regional Government's reluctance to arm Yazidi fighters. Shesho's own sons came from Germany to help their father defend the holy site. One of Qasim's sons said that the reason the KRG had not supplied the Yazidis with weapons was because they feared the Yazidis were too strong and would build an independent army. Several of his sons also lived in the Ostwestfalen-Lippe region of Germany, and two of them served for a time as soldiers in the German Bundeswehr.
His nephew Haydar Shesho is likewise a well-known Yazidi militia commander. At the onset of the August 2014 Sinjar massacre, together with his uncle Qasim Shesho and several cousins, Haydar Shesho returned to Iraq to help protect his Yazidi homeland.
2014 Sinjar massacre and defense of Sharfadin temple On 3 August 2014, IS fighters attacked Sinjar, and the roughly 10,000-strong Peshmerga garrison stationed in the district withdrew, leaving the Yazidi population largely undefended. The Peshmerga leadership fled before civilians did, according to Qasim Shesho's own account, and a Kurdish official confirmed to the Washington Post that the withdrawal had been organized. In the weeks preceding the assault, Shesho, together with his nephew Haider Shesho and other Yazidi representatives, formally requested that Serbest Bapir, chairman of the KDP's Shingal branch, allow the establishment of a Yazidi volunteer force to defend the district. They had repeatedly asked KDP officials for permission and weapons to form an independent Yazidi defense force, warning that up to 3,500 Yazidi men stood ready; the request was refused, with local KDP officials reportedly citing the presence of roughly 11,000 Peshmerga already stationed in the district. Peshmerga commander Aziz Waysi later said Kurdish security forces had also confiscated weapons from would-be Yazidi volunteers, citing a need to prevent the emergence of "disorganized forces" outside the regional command structure, a rationale that has been disputed by Yazidi leaders, who have suggested the real concern was that an armed and independent Yazidi force would be difficult for the KDP to control. The Sheshos proceeded to organize fighters regardless.
IS fighters overran Sinjar, triggering what the United Nations and other bodies have characterized as a genocide against the Yazidi religious minority. Thousands of Yazidis were killed, and thousands of women and children were abducted and enslaved, while Kurdish Peshmerga forces stationed in the district withdrew in the face of the IS advance. Around 200,000 Yazidis fled into the Sinjar mountain range, where many were besieged for months. Researcher Benjamin Raßbach, who conducted fieldwork in Sinjar between 2019 and 2021, writes that the Peshmerga's withdrawal at the start of the IS assault "effectively made the genocide possible."
On that morning after the Peshmerga garrison withdrew, Haydar Shesho left Semel near Dohuk that morning, reaching Sinjar around five hours later and entering from the north before IS forces had cut off that approach. Qasim Shesho, then based at his home near the Şerfedîn shrine, refused to leave. On 4 August, the first IS vehicle reached the shrine; its occupants, not expecting armed resistance, had already kidnapped 67 people fleeing nearby villages. Shesho's men killed one of the fighters, prompting the rest to flee and abandon their captives.
When IS forces advanced on the village of Sinoun and its adjoining shrine of Sharfadin, an approximately 800-year-old Yazidi pilgrimage site built in 1274 and dedicated to the saint Sharfadin, Shesho refused to withdraw, vowing to fight to the death to protect the shrine and stating "ISIS would have to walk on our dead body if they wanted to desecrate Sharfadin". He led a band of just eighteen lightly armed Yazidi Peshmerga fighters in defending the shrine, telling journalists "we were just 18 Peshmerga against ISIS." Supplies were extremely limited in the early stages of the siege; our men shared a single round of flatbread each day, and fighters conserved ammunition, wanting each bullet fired to be fatal.
The following days were the most difficult of the siege, as thousands of civilians, including many of the families later photographed stranded on the Sinjar Mountain, took refuge in the hills directly behind the shrine. As the siege continued, the number of armed groups defending the shrine and surrounding area grew from an initial seven to thirty-seven by the end of 2014, and to seventy-two by 2017, as Yazidis from across the district joined the defense.
When the main assault began, Islamic State fighters attempted to negotiate a surrender. Haydar Shesho refused and fired first. IS fighters then telephoned Qasim Shesho directly and demanded he surrender the shrine; he refused, reportedly telling them to come and get him. Over the following months, IS reportedly attempted as many as sixteen separate assaults on the shrine, none successful.
The most significant single episode of the siege, later remembered by many Yazidis as the "Miracle of Şerfedîn", came when an IS-operated armored vehicle laden with explosives approached the shrine and was destroyed in a massive explosion, leaving a deep hole in the road opposite Haydar Shesho's house, which was almost demolished; fragments of the vehicle were thrown more than a kilometer, and despite two men being fifteen metres away and roughly a hundred fighters being nearby, only one person sustained a minor injury, leading many to believe it was the shrine's patron, Şerfedîn, who had intervened on their behalf. Accounts of what destroyed the vehicle vary: some defenders believed it self-detonated or malfunctioned, others attributed it to a coalition airstrike (the US Air Force had begun targeting IS vehicles in the Sinjar area from 9 August 2014), and many understood it as divine intervention by the shrine's patron. The shrine's dome sustained a bullet hole from IS gunfire during the fighting, still visible years later.
On 20 October 2014, IS launched a major offensive using armored Humvees that briefly encircled Shesho's men at the shrine, in what is now referred to as the Battle of Sharfadin; Yazidi accounts put the death toll at roughly 100 fighters.[existing citation] Despite repeated appeals, Peshmerga reinforcements did not arrive; Haydar Shesho later said the defenders waited seventy-three days for help. During one nighttime bombardment, Qasim Shesho reportedly stepped out of cover holding a glass of whiskey and told his men to relax, since the incoming fire could not reach them.
The siege lasted roughly five months, during which the shrine and surrounding area were cut off and, for a period, effectively surrounded by IS-held territory. Heavily outgunned by IS, the defenders held the shrine through four months of repeated attacks, a feat many Yazidis have since regarded as effectively miraculous. Shesho's forces grew from the initial 18 men to a force of roughly 2,000 fighters as Yazidis from across the Sinjar area joined the defense, and the shrine was ultimately preserved from destruction. Several Islamic State fighters were captured, which Qasim Shesho later had executed.
Peshmerga reinforcements reached the shrine on 19 December 2014; by that point, Islamic State fighters withdrew from the area without further combat. Northern Sinjar and Sinjar city were finally retaken by Kurdish forces with the help of US-led airstrikes in late December. Villages south of the mountain, however, were not retaken by the PKK or Peshmerga at all, they were eventually recaptured by the newly formed Hashd al-Shaabi (Popular Mobilization Forces), an Iraqi government-backed militia conglomerate that by then included Yazidi brigades of its own. After the recapture, the district was left de facto divided between three separate armed factions, the PKK/YBŞ, the KDP-Peshmerga, and the Hashd al-Shaabi, each partly Yazidi in composition. A captured IS armored vehicle remains on display outside the Sharfadin shrine as a monument to its defense.
Following the initial retreat of Peshmerga forces from Sinjar, Kurdistan Region President Masoud Barzani ordered the arrest of the senior commander who had given the withdrawal order and promoted Shesho in his place, elevating him to a senior command position over Yazidi forces in the area.
Later command and post-ISIS politics