In 2014 Isis attempted to exterminate the Yazidi people of Iraq. Many who did survive were raped and tortured. Now, after a decade living in makeshift camps, they are being made to return to a homeland that still isn’t safe.
Every evening on a small, dusty hill overlooking Shariya camp in northern Iraq, men gather and watch the sun morph into a red orb and drop behind the expanse of white tents. The men are Yazidis and those tents have been their home for ten years since Islamic State fighters swept into their homeland of Sinjar, slaying thousands of men and abducting women and girls as sex slaves and boys as child soldiers.
The oldest man, in his seventies, wears a white dishdasha and red chequered scarf and sits on a plastic chair while the others squat on pieces of cardboard stamped with “Ministry of Migration and Displacement”, the Iraqi government department that oversees the camps.
For years their sundown discussions have focused on the misery of life here, where families of ten crowd into old nylon tents that are freezing in winter and sweltering in the summer, when temperatures reach 50C. A perennial hazard are the fires caused by kerosene stoves that whip through the tents. In darker moments the men reflect on the centuries-old persecution of their people, an ancient religious minority who worship a peacock angel.
Recently their conversation has changed.
“It’s time,” says Abu Nawaf, the old man. “We cannot die in these tents. We must go home to the land of our songs.”
Others shake their heads. “Our houses are in ruins,” one says. “There is no water,” points out another. “And no jobs. Nothing is OK in Sinjar.”
“Will we be safe?” asks Salam Lawa, who is out with his three small children, his daughter Luna wearing a fake Jude Bellingham football shirt. The men fall silent and stare at the disappearing sun.
All of them have lost sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, nieces and nephews. Many of the women are scared to go back to the place where so many terrible things happened to them and their families. Some of those who turned on them were from neighbouring Arab villages.
But they may have no choice. The Iraqi government announced in January that all 23 displacement camps in Kurdistan must close by the end of this month. Those camps are home to more than 155,000 displaced people, most of them Yazidis.
Though no one is expecting forcible returns, Iraq may halt services such as water, wi-fi and perhaps schools inside the camps. Rubbish collection stopped some time ago — piles of trash line up against the wire fence. To encourage people to leave, the Ministry of Migration and Displacement is offering each family four million Iraqi dinars (£5000) towards resettlement costs, as well as a flat-screen TV and fridge. The families must claim the money before the camps are shut down, but everyone says it’s nowhere near enough to rebuild their destroyed homes. Hundreds queue outside the ministry’s office in Duhok, 25km away, full of sadness and anger.
“It feels like ten wasted years in which we didn’t live,” says Shukria, 27, who lives with her parents and three siblings. “Imagine four adult children living with their parents in a tent eight metres square.”
Above all, they feel totally forgotten.
There was worldwide outrage when Isis fighters in pick-up trucks swept into the remote, dusty region of Sinjar on August 3, 2014, just 120km from Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, which they had captured two months earlier and declared the capital of their self-proclaimed caliphate. Strategically important between Iraq and Syria, Sinjar was home to about 400,000 people, including most of the world’s Yazidi population, in the shadow of a mountain where they believe Noah’s Ark came to rest. Footage of Yazidis desperately fleeing Isis on foot, with women and children scrambling up the craggy slopes of Mount Sinjar in the searing heat, prompted President Obama to organise air drops of supplies and water by helicopter and carry out some rescues. He also launched airstrikes against Isis.
It took almost three years for a coalition of US, British and other forces working with the Iraqi army to drive Isis from the country and another two years working with Syrian Kurds to drive them from their last holdout in Syria. At its height the militant group had controlled 90,650 square kilometres — about the size of Portugal.
Isis killed about 10,000 Yazidis and enslaved more than 6,000, most of them women and children. Almost their entire population was displaced. The UN and governments round the world, including Britain, France, Canada, Germany and Australia, officially recognised what happened to the Yazidis as a genocide.
In 2017 the UN Security Council passed a resolution to establish the UN Investigative Team to Promote Accountability for Crimes Committed by Da’esh/Isis (Unitad), promising survivors that justice would be served for the victims. Yet ten years on from the attack, half the Yazidi population is still in limbo. Despite many survivors coming forward and painfully telling their stories, there has been only a handful of prosecutions. About 2,500 Yazidis are still missing. Thousands of remains have been exhumed from 67 mass graves but there are thought to be at least 100 in total and only 188 bodies have been identified to date. Unitad is being abruptly wound up after Iraq refused to extend permission for it to operate.
Demands by Yazidis and human rights lawyers for an international tribunal have fallen on deaf ears. Meanwhile Isis continues to recruit people. Its branch in Afghanistan has been behind a number of recent attacks in Russia and Iran.
“Nothing has been resolved but we are not even on the table any more,” says Hewan Omer, a Yazidi woman from Sinjar and the country director of the Free Yazidi Foundation, which runs livelihood programmes in the camps and fights for justice. “The world moved on to Ukraine and Gaza and this place was left behind. But a genocide happened and we need to have justice.”
“It has been ten years since the genocide of the Yazidi people by Isis,” says Amal Clooney, the British human rights lawyer who has tirelessly advocated for them. “Ten years waiting for a reckoning. Ten years seeking restitution. Ten years hoping to go home.”
Sold as sex slaves
Imagine being chained to a bed and raped over and over by Isis fighters while knowing your two teenage daughters were going through the same torture. It’s this that haunts Naseema Neimat, 44, who has worn only black since she escaped Isis clutches after spending a year in sexual servitude.
She now lives in a makeshift dwelling of breeze blocks and blue tarpaulin just outside Khanke displacement camp in Duhok province with her husband, mother-in-law and three younger children. On the wall are two giant photos of a boy and a long-haired girl — her son Sabah, 22, and eldest daughter, Inas, 25 — among the thousands of missing Yazidis.
I have been going back and forth to the Yazidi camps since first meeting a group of traumatised women in a Greek refugee camp in 2015 who had fled through Turkey and made it to the tiny island of Leros on crowded dinghies. I have heard the most harrowing of stories but this is gut-wrenching.
“I cannot rest for a second,” Naseema says. “My eyes are always on my phone or the camp gate.”
When Isis fighters entered Sinjar in 2014, Naseema and her family fled from their village of Tal Banat, south of Mount Sinjar, to the village of Zalilie. They had gone to collect water from a spring when Isis fighters came. Her husband and one of their sons got away but Naseema, her two daughters, Inas and Renas, then 15 and 14, and sons Sabah, 12, and Hussein, 3, were captured and taken to Badush prison.
There they were separated. Inas and Renas were taken to Mosul, then into Syria, while Naseema was one of about twenty mothers taken with their sons to an Isis training base where the boys were forced to learn the Quran.
“Sabah didn’t understand, so they were beating and lashing him in front of me,” she says. “One day they tortured him so much his whole body was bleeding. Then they started training them to use guns and began selling the women.”
That was just the start. “I was sold three times over the next year,” she says. “First to a Saudi with two wives. I lived with his older wife and they were always having friends round, introducing us as their slaves, ordering in food and eating it in front of us, my little boy watching hungry. When the husband came he was raping me with force and I couldn’t do anything.
“I was there two months, then they took me to a street market in Raqqa where they were selling Yazidi women like sheep — 250 women and girls of all ages. I was sold to a Tunisian man.”
Her eyes fill with tears. “That man was very bad, I don’t even know how to describe. I was working from dawn till 2am cleaning his house then sleeping with my son in a room with no fan that was boiling hot. I locked it so he couldn’t get me. But he did.”
She trails off, then says: “I still see the images in front of me of what I experienced. It’s impossible to forget.”
That wasn’t all. “All the time this was happening to me I was thinking about my beautiful daughters and imagining it happening to them, these young girls and these old monsters.”
Having bought her for four million dinars, the Tunisian trader sold her for five million to another Tunisian, at which point she had a stroke of good fortune. That man had two wives, one of whom was kind to her and also desperate to get away. “She told me, ‘Let’s get out. I will take care of you in Syria, then when we get to Iraq you have to take care of me.’ "
Cloaked head to foot in black abayas, they went by car to the north Syrian town of al-Shadadi, where the woman knew a smuggler who helped them to cross the Turkish border. However, when they got to the Iraqi border the Turkish guards only allowed Naseema and her son across because the woman wasn’t Yazidi.
Naseema found her husband and middle son in Khanke but her elder sons and both daughters were still missing.
Four years ago Renas was finally rescued after they paid a smuggler US$12,000 ($20,000). She last saw her sister, Inas, in 2016 in al-Shadadi, where they were both being kept as sex slaves. Another smuggler told Naseema he had seen Inas in al-Hawl, the desert camp in Kurdish-held northeast Syria set up to hold remnants of Isis and their families captured after the fall of the caliphate — of all the camps I visited, this is the grimmest I have seen, with a real atmosphere of fear. He told her he could get her out if they paid him US$13,500 ($22,500).
“I was so happy I didn’t care about anything, I just wanted her back,” Naseema says. They borrowed the money, only for him to disappear with it. The family are now deeply in debt with no way to repay the money. Her husband and son earn just 10,000 dinars a day (less than $13) when they can find work such as picking potatoes.
Naseema recently started receiving 800,000 dinars a month in compensation after the Iraqi government passed the Yazidi Female Survivors Law in 2021. To qualify she had to file a criminal complaint and appear in front of a male judge to talk about what had happened to her, something many women do not want to do.
What she really wants is justice. Iraqi courts have convicted many Isis fighters for terrorism, often imposing the death sentence, but not one has been held to account for sexual slavery.
“I want to see my perpetrators cut into small pieces like a salad,” Naseema says. “To make them feel some of the pain they inflicted on me.”
She and her daughter are deeply depressed. “I can’t forget what happened to me,” she says. “Inas may still be with one of those monsters. Since coming home Renas doesn’t want to do anything, she just sits.”
There has been a spate of suicides among Yazidi women in the camps. “I’ve thought of killing myself but don’t because of the children,” Naseema says.
Day after day she scans for new arrivals. “Any time anyone comes back from Syria I speak to them and ask if they have seen Inas or Sabah. What else can I do?” she says, shrugging. “No one is helping us find the missing. It has reached a point where I am even jealous of people who find bones of loved ones in mass graves because at least once someone is dead you can move on.”
Difficult as it is living in the camp, she is horrified at the prospect of returning to Sinjar. “How can I go back? It’s a place of bad memories and no security. I went once and spent a week there and didn’t sleep one hour at night, I was so scared.”
Unrest in Sinjar
The fear of returning to Sinjar is not solely because of what happened ten years ago. Even before Isis arrived in 2014 it was a disputed territory, hostage to rivalry between the federal government in Baghdad and the Kurdish regional government in Erbil, dominated by the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), which has long sought to annexe it to the Kurdish region.
Most Yazidis feel betrayed by the Peshmerga, Iraqi Kurdistan’s US-backed armed forces, saying they had urged villagers to stay in Sinjar by pledging to protect them. Instead, as Isis fighters moved in, they abruptly withdrew in what their commanders called a “tactical retreat”, leaving the Yazidis to be massacred.
Since the departure of the Peshmerga in 2014 the rival Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) has moved in — Kurdish rebels that Turkey, the US and EU regard as a terrorist organisation. Four years ago Iraq and Kurdistan signed an agreement to stabilise Sinjar. But progress has lagged and an assortment of armed groups are active in the area, including Iranian-backed Shia militias and others linked to the PKK . With no other source of employment, many returning Yazidis sign up to these militias, which pay them US$1,000 a month.
To add to the unrest, their homeland is becoming a battleground between Turkey and PKK militants. Turkish drones often fly overhead and earlier this month four people were killed in Sinjar by a drone strike on their car. To protect themselves the PKK has been digging a network of tunnels, which returning Yazidis say are often accessed through their property. The area is also a key transit route for smuggling guns between Iraq, Turkey, Lebanon and Syria.
Hadiya’s story
The idea of returning to Sinjar also terrifies Hadiya, a young woman with a pleasant face, her hair pulled back in a scrunchie. She sits in a tent bare except for a wall hanging depicting Yazidi temples with distinctive conical spires embroidered in white sequins, the floor immaculately swept. She was 17 when she was taken as a sex slave and was kept for five years in Syria until July 2019, four months after the fall of the caliphate.
When she returned to Iraq she found all that was left of her family were two uncles, one of whom, Seydou, an Arabic teacher, she now lives with. Her three sisters had escaped captivity earlier but had moved to Germany as part of a programme organised by the state of Baden-Württemberg.
Her parents are still missing, as are her three brothers — killed, she believes, with her father in the village of Kocho, to which they fled from their own village, Gohbal, north of Mount Sinjar, when Isis came. Kocho was the home of Nadia Murad, whose bravery in telling her own story of sexual slavery led to her becoming a UN envoy and being awarded the Nobel peace prize in 2018.
“They rounded up about four hundred of us in a school, including Nadia,” Hadiya says. “They blindfolded all the men and older boys and took them away while we women and small boys were held upstairs. We don’t know where they took the men but we heard shooting. We were all crying, our mums trying to comfort us. Then after an hour or two they took all the women over 40 and shot them dead too. Many children saw their mothers killed in front of them.”
Hadiya’s own mother was spared but she was separated from her daughters, who were loaded onto two buses and taken to a mosque in Mosul. The boys went on a third bus. “They put twenty of us in a room with just one pack of bread and cheese. Then they took the four smallest girls and said they were for Abu Baghdadi.” The Iraqi leader of Isis, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, later killed himself with a suicide vest during a raid by US forces in 2019. His first wife, Asma Mohammed, was sentenced to death by a court in Iraq last month.
“The rest of us including Nadia were blindfolded and taken to a big house with all the doors and windows blacked out and split into three rooms,” Hadiya says. “They would bring these Isis princes and make us sit as they chose which they would take. We were all terrified because we were children and they were very old. The girls came back with bruises all over. In the end they took everyone, including Nadia. Only me and my two sisters and one other girl were left.”
It was their turn next. They were picked out by foreign recruits who had come to Iraq to fight for Isis. “A Ukrainian man and his son and a Russian took the four of us to a military base and into different rooms. The Ukrainian took me, tied my hands to the bed with handcuffs over my head and tried to rape me but I resisted, so he pulled off all my clothes and tied my legs to the bed.
“When he left I tried to jump out of the window. I also took a piece of glass from the window and tried to cut my wrist but he came and tried to rape me again, even shooting twice from his pistol. I cried a lot because I was so scared of the raping.”
Next they were driven to Raqqa to a base of foreign fighters where she was given to another Ukrainian man, who had two wives and two sons, whom she says was one of the leaders.
“Every time he beat me, he said, ‘You deserve this, you are Yazidi. If you don’t let me rape you I will beat you every day.’ His wife also beat me and burnt me with hot oil.”
Hadiya was there for a year. “One day he said, ‘My wife doesn’t want you around,’ so he took me back to the base and gave me to another Ukrainian who was raping me and chained me to a wall so I couldn’t leave.”
Eventually he took her across the border to Iraq. An Isis court formally transferred her to a fighter from Mosul. “They sold us like cars,” she says.
While her previous captors had given her contraceptives, the Mosul fighter did not and she was soon pregnant, giving birth to a baby boy. In 2019, during the final battle in the city, they fled by car towards Turkey, but were picked up by Kurdish forces.
Initially held in a women’s prison in northeast Syria, Hadiya faced a terrible dilemma — like so many of the abducted Yazidi women. While the Yazidis’ spiritual leader, Baba Sheikh, was persuaded to issue an edict welcoming back the abducted women, this did not extend to the children born of Isis rape, who are deemed to be Muslim under Iraqi law.
“I wanted to keep him but it would have been impossible because my community doesn’t accept Muslim babies, and how could I look after him alone? So they took him away to an orphanage. I hope he is safe.”
Alone in the tent, she dreams of going abroad and studying to be a lawyer. “It’s too late here,” she says. One of the many iniquities for Yazidi women returning home is that the Iraqi government does not allow people over 18 to go back to school, no matter how much they have missed.
Hadiya would like to join her sisters in Baden-Württemberg but the scheme has ended — in fact Germany has started to send some Yazidis back to Iraq. She has little hope of finding her other family members. “My brother was made to fight by Isis and I heard from a man who was fighting with him that he stepped on a mine in Baghuz close to the border with Iraq and was killed.”
As for her parents, she thinks they may be in a mass grave in Tal Afar.
“I try to stay strong,” she smiles. “There’s no justice in Iraq. If there was I wouldn’t be in this camp all these years. All my friends are outside Iraq now. When I hear from them about their good life I feel sad but I don’t say anything.”
Rescue efforts
Of the estimated 2,500 Yazidis still missing, many are thought to have been killed in airstrikes while being held as slaves in Raqqa. Others are still with Isis fighters who escaped to Turkey, where they are reportedly being traded on WhatsApp groups.
Hadiya’s painful decision to leave her baby son behind in Kurdish-held Syria so she can rejoin her community — only to find most of her family gone — explains why some Yazidi women are choosing to stay in the al-Hawl desert camp. It is a truly terrible place dominated by extremists. Camp officials say it is not uncommon to find the beheaded bodies of women.
Horrified by seeing children in these conditions, on a visit in 2019 Peter Galbraith, a former US diplomat and long-time friend of the Kurds, has been trying to get them out. “It’s not just a totally insanitary place to keep children, but it also leaves them prey to radicalisation,” he says.
Despite the hazardous journey in and out, and the complicated political negotiations required to free the Yazidis, he has called on an array of contacts that reach up the ranks to President Biden. So far Galbraith has rescued 20 Yazidi women and 30 children in four operations, the most recent of which was in May. Unable to go back to their communities unless they abandon their children, he has arranged for these women and children to move to Sweden and Australia.
“What happened to the Yazidis was appalling,” he says. “This is the clearest case of genocide since the Second World War — but now its victims are forgotten. What irks me is the lack of sympathy from the Yazidi community for these girls who had children — it’s a classic case of the victimised becoming the victimiser.”
Sanctuary in Germany
While the UK has been the most vocal country on preventing sexual violence in conflict — even setting up a department in the Foreign Office under William Hague — it has neither taken in any of the Yazidi women nor taken steps to prosecute any of their perpetrators.
Instead it is Germany that has led the way in providing sanctuary for the traumatised women and working to get the justice they so desperately want. The state of Baden-Württemberg took in more than a thousand of the rescued women and German courts recently held the first trial against an Isis member for crimes against the Yazidis, as well as for aiding and abetting genocide.
Jennifer Wenisch, 30, a German Isis bride, and her Iraqi husband, Taha al-Jumailly, 29, were convicted three years ago for the death of a five-year-old Yazidi girl, Reda, they had bought as a slave along with her mother. They had chained the little girl outside their house in Fallujah in the scorching summer sun after she had wet her bed and left her there until she died of heat and thirst. In 2021 Jumailly was given a life sentence in the first conviction for committing genocide against the Yazidis. Wenisch was convicted for crimes against humanity and sentenced to ten years, which a judge last year increased to 14 years. Prosecutors used the principle of universal jurisdiction, which allows prosecutions for war crimes to be held in other countries. Amal Clooney played a key role in getting justice on behalf of the Yazidis.
Since then German courts have prosecuted seven other cases against Isis members: women in all but one case, mainly because either the male perpetrators were killed or they are still in camps — it’s the Isis wives who have come back. Other countries, including the Netherlands and France, are now following suit. However, it is expensive and, Clooney says, not enough. “We have seen Isis members put on trial and convictions for genocide thanks to the courage of individual survivors. But Yazidis cannot move on without a process for justice at scale,” Clooney says. “Isis remains a global threat and this grim ten-year milestone is a reminder that much remains to be done if these incredible survivors are to get access to the justice they deserve.”
Broken promises
Walking round the battered tents of the Shariya and Khanke camps, there is a sense that hope is lost. I try to imagine living in such a place with no privacy for ten years. Inside each tent is another tragedy. The days when people thought that telling their stories to journalists could rally the outside world to act are long gone. One of the most heart-rending WhatsApp messages I’ve ever received was from a young Yazidi woman. “I told my story, what difference did it make?” she asked. I couldn’t answer.
Just outside Khanke camp, in a converted garage furnished with a large brown sofa set, I meet Khansa, a white-haired lady of 74, and her granddaughters Rosa, 21, and Ibtihaj, 18. Rosa was just 11 when she was taken by Isis along with her older sisters. For the first week she was still with her mother. “My mum cut my hair to look like a boy and put me in boys’ clothes. I told them I was a boy but in the end they took me too,” she says.
Rosa was held for eight years and does not want to talk about what happened. When she was invited recently to speak at a conference in London, the Home Office would not grant her a visa.
Ibtihaj was held for three years. “I was so happy when they came back,” Khansa says, wiping away tears. However, their father, their mothers (the father had two wives), three sisters and brother are all still missing, as are their uncle, aunt and cousins — 17 family members in total.
“I wish both their mothers come back and I die instead,” she says. “I have no teeth and can barely speak but whenever they dig a mass grave I go. We gave our blood for DNA testing but heard nothing.”
Like many she cannot understand what happened to the promises of help from the international community and is furious at the UN for the demise of Unitad.
“Is that it?” she asks. “What will happen to all the evidence?”
“The fear is it will just end up in a basement in the UN office in New York,” says Pari Ibrahim, founder of the Free Yazidi Foundation.
No one trusts the government in Baghdad. Last summer a wave of Isis-style hate speech against Yazidis surfaced on social media.
When I ask about returning to Sinjar there is sheer terror in the old lady’s eyes. “Who will protect us? What is to stop the same thing happening again?”
Starting from zero
In a world of short attention spans and more conflicts than at any time since the Second World War, the focus has moved on. NGOs have shifted staff to Kyiv and Tel Aviv or Gaza. Little by little, people are packing up and leaving the camps. Every day on the highway to Sinjar, through the checkpoints manned by Iraqi, Kurdish and Iranian-backed militias, pass small open-backed trucks piled high with belongings, including the hated tents.
Among those who have made their way back to Sinjar are Rasho and Siran Khalf Findi, a brother and sister who travelled with their mother and seven other siblings from Shariya camp. Their father died of a heart attack in 2014 from the stress of fleeing Isis.
“Ten years in a tent is not normal,” says Siran, 35. “No privacy, no hygiene. Waiting for hours in the sun for some expired food aid. I felt as if I was losing the value of being human.”
Their family of ten had been living in two tents, yet somehow she completed a degree in computer science. “I had to wait for everyone to fall asleep, then in the late hours I could prepare my studies,” she says.
Both Rasho and Siran are eager to help their community but admit they would not have returned to Sinjar if not for the Iraqi government deadline. “It’s not easy coming back,” Rasho says, pointing at the ruins of their former house. “We don’t have water, shelter, electricity. We are starting from zero.”
Can they ever feel safe after all that happened there? His sister’s face says everything.
Written by: Christina Lamb
© The Times of London