Armed with insights gathered during her two-week research trip to USC Shoah Foundation, Professor Maria Rita Corticelli is ready to begin building an archive of testimonies of minority groups who have experienced various forms of mass violence, including genocide and ethnic cleansing, in Iraq.

“It’s something that is absolutely missing because there is nothing on Iraq regarding genocides committed there, not only the last one by ISIS but the ones committed before,” Corticelli said. “There is no centralized database where these testimonies are together.”

Corticelli, who is a professor at the International University of Erbil in Iraq and director of its Center of Genocide Studies and Human Rights, reached out to USC Shoah Foundation Executive Director Stephen Smith about her plans and desire to learn more about building an archive of survivor testimonies. Smith promptly invited her to spend two weeks at the Institute researching the Visual History Archive firsthand and consulting with staff.

She intends to record an initial 750 interviews, beginning this fall, in the Kirkuk, Dohuk and Erbil areas of Iraqi Kurdistan. She and her team of interviewers will seek out members of the Yezidi, Christian, Kak’ai and Mandean communities who have survived violence perpetrated by ISIS, al Quaeda and the Iraqi military over the past 15 years.

Most of these survivors have fled to the Kurdish region to escape violence in their home villages, Corticelli said, so now survivors of different conflicts live side by side, allowing her team to record a sampling of testimonies from each conflict in a few key locations.

The interviews will then be archived in an online database hosted by the Center in Erbil, which will be open to researchers, policy makers, activists and other experts. Due to ongoing safety concerns for the survivors, the archive will not be open to the public.

Corticelli said exploring the Visual History Archive in-depth has been eye-opening, and has helped inform how she will build Iraq’s own survivor testimony archive.

In particular, she’s found the VHA’s indexing system to be a crucial tool for viewers to efficiently search through hundreds of hours of testimony to find the segments most relevant to their interests, and she wants to incorporate a similar system in the Iraq archive.

She also appreciates how the VHA features testimonies from several different genocides and countless communities and cultures, enabling comparative studies. In her project, the survivors will come from diverse backgrounds as well.

“Putting together testimonies from different groups in same database, researchers will have access to all of them and can compare,” Corticelli said. “Otherwise the knowledge keeps being very fragmented.”

She pointed out that having an archive of survivor testimonies will help reconstruct the ideology and mentality of the perpetrators, including ISIS. This will hopefully inform future prosecution of those responsible for the violence and persecution of these minority groups.

The archive will be the first of its kind in the Middle East, Corticelli said, and could go a long way toward helping Iraqis confront their own history and begin the process of transitional justice. Because they have gone straight from war to war to war, Iraqis tend to not have much confidence that justice is possible – but it is.

“There is no accessible record of [violence against minorities] in Iraq. This is very detrimental because it doesn’t help the peace process. It doesn’t help people have closure, a sense that they can have justice,” she said. “[But] in order to take people to justice, you need evidence.”