A Yazidi Survivor’s Struggle Shows The Pain That Endures After ISIS Attack

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One of the camps in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq for displaced Yazidis. About 200,000 Yazidis are in the camps, many waiting for help to rebuild homes damaged or destroyed by ISIS in 2014.

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Destroyed buildings in the city of Sinjar, northern Iraq, pictured in 2019. Kurdish security forces protecting the Sinjar region withdrew and ISIS took over large parts of northern Iraq in August 2014. Some of the buildings were damaged in the U.S.-backed fight by Iraqi and Kurdish forces to defeat ISIS.

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Um Hiba hasn’t heard from her husband since. The fighters threw her and other women into car trunks and, amid U.S. air strikes against ISIS ordered by then-President Obama, took them to Syria.

She lost the child she was carrying.

«They were beating us with their boots, the rifle butts, anything they had in their hands, she says. «I started bleeding and the baby was gone.

In the towns they went through, ISIS drove buses full of Yazidi women and girls for sale through the markets.

«Sometimes ISIS fighters would board the bus and choose one of us, she says. «They would drive around with a speaker, saying, ‘If you don’t have an infidel yet this is your chance to take one.'

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The teenager was bought by four ISIS men in the three years she was enslaved. She ended up being taken by an Iraqi fighter to live with his family in Mosul, where she was raped, beaten and starved. The fighter’s wife forced her to serve as her maid.

She became pregnant by the ISIS fighter enslaving her. When she had the baby, she says, she struggled to keep him from hitting the child.

In 2017, Iraqi and U.S. forces started liberating neighborhoods in Mosul from ISIS. Um Hiba was freed and had a joyful reunion with her family in the displacement camp in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq.

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The city of Dohuk in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. The majority of the displaced Iraqi Yazidi community lives in camps or construction sites they settled near here after escaping ISIS by being led to safety through the mountains by Syrian Kurds.

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Handprints in the mountaintop temple of Lalish in northern Iraq — the holiest site in the Yazidi faith. People come to the temple to ask for blessings. Since the genocide, religious elders have conducted a ritual here to religiously purify women held captive by ISIS.

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Um Hiba agreed to give her daughter to an aid organization. She didn’t go to school and can’t read or write, so she couldn’t read the document giving up her right to see the child and or find out what happened to her.

«Anytime I see a mother calling, carrying or taking her child to a shop, I wish I had my child too to take care of her, play with her, kiss her and smell her, she says.

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Most Yazidis displaced by ISIS still live in camps years after being freed or escaping as long as six years ago. Although the Iraqi government and the international community have pledged to help survivors rebuild their lives, most have no homes to go to and no income.

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Um Hiba says she was so upset she decided to kill herself. She says she thought of walking out in the highway in front of a car but was too afraid. So she bought rat poison from the local shop and locked herself in the kitchen.

Her friend screamed at her from the other side of the door. «She said, ‘You’re not the only one taken by ISIS — there are thousands,’ Um Hiba recalls. Her mother was crying and her neighbors were shouting as her family broke the door lock with a brick to take the poison away from her.

«They said, ‘Have you lost your mind?’ says Um Hiba. «I said, ‘If a mother is alive and not able to see her daughter and goes through all of this, why did God make it that human beings love their children?’ «

Her suicide attempt thwarted, Um Hiba still languishes in the camp. In a phone interview last week, she said she is still dreaming that she might somehow get her child back and find a place where she and her daughter could be together.

Six years after ISIS began the genocide, most Yazidis are stuck, without homes, jobs, income or psychological support. Although about 250 families (or about 2,000 people) have returned to Sinjar to either live in tents on the mountain or to try to rebuild destroyed homes, most remain in camps in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq with surviving family members. The Iraqi government and the international community, which had pledged to help survivors rebuild their lives, have provided little concrete help.

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Yazidis continue to live in emergency tents near the top of Mount Sinjar six years after being displaced from their towns and villages. Some of them say they feel safer on the mountain where they fled to escape ISIS.

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A camp for displaced Yazidis in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. Six years after ISIS began the genocide, most displaced Yazidis are stuck, without homes, jobs, income or systematic psychological support for traumatized children. Aid groups say an estimated 3,000 Yazidis are still missing — many feared dead and some still being held by ISIS.

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A camp for displaced Yazidis in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. Six years after ISIS began the genocide, most displaced Yazidis are stuck, without homes, jobs, income or systematic psychological support for traumatized children. Aid groups say an estimated 3,000 Yazidis are still missing — many feared dead and some still being held by ISIS.

Andrea DiCenzo for NPR

Sangar Khaleel contributed to this story from Irbil.