Ten years after the IS violence, many Yazidis are still struggling to find safe homes

When Rihan Ismail returned to her family home in the heart of the Yazidi community, she was sure she was coming to stay forever.

Throughout the long years in the captivity of the extremist group IS, she had longed for the moment when she would see her childhood home again.

IS fighters abducted Ismail when she was a teenager as they rampaged through Sinjar district in northern Iraq, where thousands of people from the Yazidi religious minority were enslaved or killed.

When she was abducted from Iraq to Syria, she clung to the memories of home: a childhood filled with laughter, a community so close-knit that your neighbor’s house was like your own.

When her abductors finally took her to Turkey, she was able to get hold of a phone, contact her family and plan her escape. The dream was to return home to the community she had so abruptly left several years earlier.

Killed family members

– How can I ever leave again? 24-year-old Ismail told the AP news agency last year, shortly after she returned to her village of Hardan.

But reality quickly set in.

The house where she lives with her brother’s family is one of the few still standing in the village. A nearby school houses displaced families.

Her father and younger sister are still missing. In a local cemetery, three of her brothers are buried together with 13 other boys and men killed by IS.

Every time she has an errand in a neighboring town, Ismail has to pass by the cemetery. It hurts.

– You feel like you die a thousand times between here and there, she says.

Horrible memories

A decade after the IS violence, several Yazidis have finally dared to return to their homes in Sinjar. But despite the fact that their homeland Iraq carries deep emotional and religious significance for them, there are many who no longer see a future there.

There is no money to rebuild destroyed homes. The infrastructure is still destroyed. Several armed groups are still fighting for influence in the area.

The region is still haunted by terrible memories. In August 2014, IS fighters stormed Sinjar, determined to wipe out the small, religious group they considered infidels. IS killed boys and men, while girls and women were sold as sex slaves or forced to convert and marry IS fighters. Those who could, fled.

Over 3,000 Yazidis, mainly men and elderly women, were killed. Around 6,000 women and children were captured. The boys who were abducted were trained as fighters for the extremist group that had killed their fathers.

Identity crisis

It has been seven years since IS was defeated in Iraq. Yet, as of April this year, only 43 percent of the more than 300,000 people who were forced to flee Sinjar have returned, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM).

Some fear that if the Yazidis do not return, the community will lose its identity.

– Without Sinjar, Yazidism becomes like a dying cancer patient, says Hadi Babasheikh. He is the brother of the late spiritual leader of the Yazidis, and had the role of his office manager during IS atrocities.

Sinjar, a strategically remote area in the corner of northwestern Iraq near the border with Syria, has been home to the Yazidis for centuries. On a semi-arid plain, their villages are scattered.

The Sinjar mountains rise high above the plain landscape and the mountain ridge is considered sacred by the Yazidis. According to legend, it was there that Noah, who built Noah’s ark, settled down after the flood. When IS stormed their villages, hundreds of thousands of Yazidis fled up the mountain to escape the extremists, as they have done on previous occasions when they have been persecuted.

Dispute with the government

In front of small shops on the main street in Sinjar city, soldiers rest in the afternoon sun. A livestock market in the center brings buyers and sellers from neighboring villages and other areas. Some workers are working on the reconstruction of a house among piles of concrete.

But in Sinjar’s outer areas, the signs of IS’s destruction remain, with collapsed houses and abandoned petrol stations as far as the eye can see. Water networks, health facilities and schools, even religious shrines, have not been rebuilt. Sinjar city’s main Sunni Muslim district remains in ruins.

The Iraqi government and the authorities of the semi-autonomous northern Kurdish region are fighting over power and influence, and both have supported each other’s rival local government. The dispute is currently playing out in the debate over the refugee camps in the region, which still house many of those who fled Sinjar.

Earlier this year, the Iraqi government ordered the camps to be closed by July 30 and offered payments of 4 million dinars, just over NOK 32,000, to residents who leave.

Karim al-Nouri, deputy minister for the displaced, said in July that the difficulties of returning to Sinjar were no longer present. But Kurdish authorities say they will not evict the people who are still seeking refuge in the refugee camps.

“Sinjar is not suitable as a home for people,” said Khairi Bozani, an adviser to Kurdish regional president Nachirvan Barzani.

– The government is supposed to move people from a bad place to a better place, not the other way around.

Fear for safety

Kudeida Murad Ismail is among those who refuse to leave the camp in Dohuk, where he has started his own makeshift shop. Leaving the camp would mean losing his livelihood, and the payment from the government does not cover the reconstruction of his house, he says.

If the camps are closed, he says he will stay in the area and look for other work.

But some still return to Sinjar. On June 24, Barakat Khalil’s family of nine left Dohuk, which had been their home for almost a decade.

Now they live in a small house they have rented in Sinjar city. They have fixed the house’s broken doors and windows and gradually started furnishing, even planting some flowers outside. Their old home, in a nearby village, is destroyed.

– We stayed in that house for two months before IS fighters came and blew it up, he says.

Khalil’s 25-year-old daughter Haifa Barakat is the only one in the family who has a job. She works at the local hospital’s pharmacy.

– Now we live a completely new life. We don’t know anyone here, she says.

Although life in Sinjar is livable now, she worries about her family’s safety in the long term. Parts of the territory are patrolled by the Iraqi army, other parts are patrolled by Kurdish peshmerga forces and other militias who came there to fight IS but never left. One of them is the armed Yazidi militia YBS, which has close ties to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK).

– Impossible to forget

The fact that armed groups operate in the area has in some cases made it complicated to rebuild the region. In 2022, a destroyed school was rebuilt by a Japanese aid organization, only to be occupied by a militia a short time later, to the organization’s great frustration.

In July, the Nineveh Provincial Council finally voted to appoint a single mayor for Sinjar, but disagreements have delayed his entry.

The incoming mayor, school administrator and community activist Saido al-Ahmady, hopes to rebuild community services so that it becomes attractive for more people to return.

But many of those who moved back to Sinjar say they are considering leaving again.

At sunset in Dugure, children ride bicycles in the streets and women chat outside their homes.

Rihan Ismail, who once dreamed of returning home to Sinjar, now wants to get away.

– It is impossible to forget. But in that loss, you don’t have to be reminded of how the village was destroyed every time you come and go, she says.