Yazidis uprooted by Islamic State 10 years ago struggle to find safe homes

SINJAR, Iraq — When Rihan Ismail returned to her family's home in the heartland of her Yazidi community, she was sure she was coming back for good.

She had yearned for that moment throughout long years of captivity.

Islamic State militants had abducted then-adolescent Ismail as they rampaged through Iraq's Sinjar district, killing and enslaving thousands from the Yazidi religious minority.

As they moved her from Iraq to Syria, she clung to what home meant to her: a childhood filled with laughter, a community so tight-knit the neighbor's house was like your own. After her captors took her to Turkey, she finally managed to get ahold of a phone, contact her family and plan a rescue.

"How could I leave again?" Ismail, 24, told The Associated Press last year, soon after returning to her village, Hardan.

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 along with 13 other men and boys killed by IS.

Ismail passes it every time she has an errand in a neighboring town.

"You feel like you're dying 1,000 deaths between here and there," she said.

A decade after the IS assault, members of the Yazidi community have been trickling back to their homes in Sinjar. But despite their homeland's deep emotional and religious significance, many see no future there.

There's no money to rebuild destroyed homes. Infrastructure is still wrecked. Multiple armed groups carve up the area.

And the landscape is haunted by horrific memories. In August 2014, militants stormed through Sinjar, determined to erase the tiny, insular religious group they considered heretics. 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 IS was defeated in Iraq. But as of April 2024, only 43% of the more than 300,000 people displaced from Sinjar had returned, according to the International Migration Organization.

Some fear that if Yazidis don't return, the community may lose its identity.

"Without Sinjar, Yazidism would be like a cancer patient who's dying," said Hadi Babasheikh, the brother and office manager of the late Yazidi spiritual leader who held the position during IS' atrocities.

This strategically located remote corner of northwest Iraq near the Syrian border has been the Yazidis' home for centuries. Villages are scattered across a semi-arid plain.

Rearing up from the flatland are the Sinjar Mountains, a long, narrow range considered sacred by the Yazidis. Legend says Noah's ark settled on the mountain after the flood. Yazidis fled to the heights to escape IS, as they have done in past bouts of persecution.

In Sinjar town, the district center, soldiers lounge in front of small shops on the main street. A livestock market brings buyers and sellers from neighboring villages and beyond. Some reconstruction crews work among piles of cinder blocks.

But in outlying areas, signs of the destruction — collapsed houses, abandoned fuel stations — remain everywhere. Water networks, health facilities and schools, even religious shrines have not been rebuilt. Sinjar town's main Sunni Muslim district remains mostly rubble.

The central government in Baghdad and authorities in the semi-autonomous northern Kurdish region have been wrestling over Sinjar, where each has backed a rival local government.

That dispute is now playing out in a debate over the displacement camps in the Kurdish region housing many of those who fled Sinjar.

Earlier this year, Baghdad ordered the camps to be closed by July 30 and offered payments of 4 million dinars (about $3,000) to occupants who leave.

Karim al-Nouri, deputy minister for the displaced, said this month that difficulties in returning to Sinjar "have been overcome." But Kurdish authorities say they won't evict the camp residents.

Sinjar "is not suitable for human habitation," said Khairi Bozani, an advisor to the Kurdish regional president, Nechirvan Barzani.

"The government is supposed to move people from a bad place to a good place and not vice versa."

Khudeida Murad Ismail refuses to leave the camp in Dohuk, where he runs a makeshift store. Leaving would mean losing his livelihood, and the payout wouldn't cover rebuilding his house, he said. If the camps closed, he says he'll stay in the area and look for other work.

But some are returning. On June 24, Barakat Khalil's family of nine left the town in Dohuk that had been their home for nearly a decade.

They now live in a small, rented house in Sinjar town. They fixed its broken doors and windows and are gradually furnishing it, even planting geraniums. Their old home, in a nearby village, is destroyed.

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

Now, "it's a totally new life — we don't know anybody here," said Khalil's 25-year-old daughter, Haifa Barakat. She's the only family member currently working, in the local hospital's pharmacy.

Although life in Sinjar is tolerable for now, she worries about security.

Different parts of the territory are patrolled by the Iraqi army and Kurdish peshmerga forces, along with various militias that came to fight IS and never left.

Prominent among those is the Sinjar Resistance Units, or YBS, a Yazidi militia that is part of the primarily Shiite Popular Mobilization Forces.

Turkey regularly launches airstrikes against its members because it is aligned with the Kurdistan Workers Party' or PKK, a Kurdish separatist group that has waged an insurgency in Turkey.

The presence of armed groups has sometimes complicated rebuilding. In 2022, a damaged school in Sinjar was rehabilitated by a Japanese NGO. Instead, Japanese officials complained that a militia took it.

This month, the Nineveh provincial council finally voted to appoint a single mayor for Sinjar, but disputes have delayed his confirmation.

The would-be mayor, school administrator and community activist Saido al-Ahmady, said he hopes to restore services so more displaced will return.

But many of those who have come back say they are thinking of leaving again.

In the village of Dugure, on a recent evening, children rode bicycles and women in robes chatted at sunset in front of their houses.

Rihan Ismail, who once dreamed of a return to Sinjar, now wants to get away.

"You wouldn't be able to forget. But at least every time you come or go you wouldn't have to see your village destroyed like this," she said.