Ten years later, many Yazidis displaced by the Islamic State onslaught are struggling to find a stable home

When they moved her from Iraq to Syria, she clung to what home meant to her: a childhood filled with laughter, a community so close-knit that your neighbor’s house was just like yours. After her captors took her to Turkey, she was finally able to get a phone, contact her family, and plan a rescue.

“How could I ever leave?” Ismail, 24, told The Associated Press last year, shortly after she returned to her village of Hardan.

The house where she lives with her brother, a police officer, and his wife and toddler is one of the few houses left standing in the village. A school down the street houses displaced families with nowhere else to go.

Her father and younger sister are still missing. In a cemetery on the edge of the village, three of her brothers are buried, along with 13 other local men and boys killed by IS and discovered in a mass grave.

Ismail passes by every time she has to do some shopping in a neighboring town.

“You feel like you’re dying 1,000 deaths between here and there,” she said.

Ten years after the IS onslaught, members of the Yazidi community have slowly returned to their homes in Sinjar. But despite the deep emotional and religious significance of their homeland, many see no future there.

There is no money to rebuild destroyed houses. The infrastructure is still destroyed. Several armed groups divide the area.

And the landscape is haunted by horrible memories. In August 2014, militants stormed through Sinjar, determined to wipe out the small, isolated religious group they considered heretical. They killed men and boys, sold women into sex slavery or forced them to convert and marry militants. Those who could, fled.

It has been seven years since ISIS was defeated in Iraq. But as of April 2024, only 43% of the more than 300,000 displaced people from Sinjar had returned, according to the International Migration Organization.

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

“Sinjar is the center of gravity of the Yazidi,” said Hadi Babasheikh, the brother and office manager of the late Yazidi spiritual leader who held the position during the ISIS atrocities. “Without Sinjar, Yazidism would be like a dying cancer patient.”

This strategically located, remote corner of northwestern Iraq, near the Syrian border, has been home to the Yazidis for centuries. Villages dot the semi-arid plain, with sheep, a cement factory and the occasional liquor store.

Rising from the flatlands are the Sinjar Mountains, a long, narrow range of mountains considered sacred by the Yazidis. According to legend, Noah’s Ark crashed on the mountain after the Great Flood. Yazidis fled to the heights to escape ISIS, as they have done in previous periods of persecution.

In Sinjar, the district center, soldiers hang outside small shops on the main street. A livestock market draws buyers and sellers from nearby villages and beyond. Here and there, reconstruction teams work among piles of cinder blocks.

But in remote areas, signs of the destruction are everywhere—collapsed homes, abandoned gas stations. Water networks, health facilities and schools, and even religious shrines have not been rebuilt. The main Sunni Muslim district of Sinjar city remains in ruins; its residents have not returned and face hostility from their former Yazidi neighbors who see them as ISIS collaborators.

The central government in Baghdad and authorities in the semi-autonomous northern Kurdish region are at odds over Sinjar, with both backing a rival local government for years.

That dispute is now playing out in a debate over the refugee camps in the Kurdish region, where many of the refugees from Sinjar are staying.

Earlier this year, Baghdad ordered the camps to close by July 30 and offered 4 million dinars (about $3,000) to residents who would leave.

Karim al-Nouri, deputy minister for displaced people, said this month that the difficulties in returning to Sinjar “have been overcome” and that getting the displaced back is “an official, humanitarian and moral obligation”.

But Kurdish authorities say they will not evict the camp residents.

Sinjar “is not fit for human habitation,” said Khairi Bozani, an adviser to Kurdish regional president Nechirvan Barzani.

“The government should take people from a bad place to a good place and not the other way around.”

Khudeida Murad Ismail refuses to leave the camp in Dohuk, where he runs a makeshift shop selling eggs, instant noodles, pacifiers and hair henna. If he leaves, he will lose his livelihood and the payout would not cover the rebuilding of his home, he said.

He said that if the camps closed, he would stay in the area, rent a house and look for other work.

He acknowledged that if many Yazidis stay away from Sinjar, other groups will likely populate their areas. That saddens him, he said, “but I can’t do anything about it.”

But the order to close the camps and the relocation allowances have led to an increase in revenues.

On June 24, Barakat Khalil’s family of nine joined a convoy of trucks loaded with mattresses, blankets and household items as they left the city of Dohuk, where they had lived for nearly a decade.

They now live in a small rented house in the town of Sinjar. They have repaired the broken doors and windows and are gradually furnishing it, even planting geraniums.

Their old house, in a nearby village, was destroyed. A humanitarian organization cleared the rubble, leaving only the foundation, but could not help them rebuild. Khalil had worked on the house for seven years, gradually saving money from his construction work.

“We stayed there for two months and then they (IS militants) came and blew it up,” he said.

Now, “it’s a completely new life — we don’t know anyone here,” said Khalil’s 25-year-old daughter, Haifa Barakat. She is the only family member who works, in the pharmacy of the local hospital.

Although life in Sinjar is bearable now, she worries about safety.

Several parts of the area are held by the Iraqi army and Kurdish Peshmerga forces, along with several militias that sought to fight IS and never left.

One of the best-known groups is the Sinjar Resistance Units (YBS), a Yazidi militia that is part of the mainly Shiite Popular Mobilization Forces.

Turkey regularly carries out airstrikes on its members because of its ties to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a Kurdish separatist group that has waged an insurgency in Turkey.

At the YBS headquarters near the Syrian border, the group’s then acting commander, Khalid Rasho Qassim, also known as Abu Shadi, said in an interview last year that his group had been fighting IS when official forces fled.

“The young people joined because they saw us defending them,” he said.

Less than a week later, he was killed by a Turkish airstrike, the same fate as his predecessor.

The presence of armed groups has also complicated reconstruction at times. In 2022, a damaged school in Sinjar was renovated by a Japanese NGO called IVY, hoping to relieve overcrowding in the few functioning schools in the area. Instead, Japanese officials complained that a militia had taken over the renovated facility.

When AP reporters visited the school last September, classes were not in session, but a few young men and women were in the hallway, where bookshelves were filled with revolutionary texts. Staff said the school’s principal was unavailable.

IVY later said it was told the building had been abandoned. But when an AP team returned this month, they found the same young men who had been there earlier, asking the journalists to leave.

This month, the Nineveh provincial council finally voted to appoint a single mayor for Sinjar, but there were conflicts that stood in the way of his appointment.

Mayor-designate, school principal and community activist Saido al-Ahmady said he hopes this will help restore services so more displaced people can return.

“Sinjar has always been the center of the Yazidis and we will keep it that way,” he said.

But many of those who have returned say they are considering leaving again.

In the village of Dugure on a recent evening, children rode bicycles and women in traditional robes chatted in front of their homes as the sun set.

“Ultimately we have to return,” said Hadi Shammo, whose family left a camp last month, to Sinjar. “This is part of our identity.”

But when pressed, Shammo admitted: “If I had the chance, I would have left Iraq long ago.”

Rihan Ismail, who once spent her days dreaming of returning to Sinjar, now wants to leave.

“Even if you went somewhere else, you wouldn’t be able to forget it. But at least every time you came or went, you wouldn’t see your village destroyed like that,” she said.

A photo of her missing father stared down from the wall. In the corner was a small replica of Lalish, the holiest Yazidi shrine, and a snake, a sacred symbol of protection.

“You can’t forget what happened, but you have to find a way to live with it.”

She now has hopes of joining her mother and other family members who have settled in Canada.

Associated Press journalists Mariam Fam in Dohuk, Iraq, and Salar Salim in Irbil, Iraq, contributed to this report.

Associated Press religion coverage receives support from the AP’s partnership with The Conversation US, with funding from the Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.