By Anas al-Bar | 2024-08-20

In a crime now classified as genocide, "Islamic State of Iraq and Syria" (ISIS) fighters attacked Sinjar in northwestern Iraq's Ninawa province on August 3, 2014, killing thousands of men and abducting their wives and daughters.

A decade later, the Yazidis -- a minority group that has inhabited Sinjar for thousands of years -- are still struggling to return to their villages, and to heal from the physical and psychological wounds ISIS inflicted.

Among those bearing the scars is Nahla, a young woman who asked to use a pseudonym. She was abducted by ISIS when she was just 15 years old.

Nahla told Al-Fassel she is still traumatized by the "horror of that day" when ISIS fighters killed her father and brother and took her away from Sinjar.

She was later sold to an ISIS fighter who used her as a sexual slave, starved her and subjected her to other kinds of ill treatment for two years, until he was killed in battle by Iraqi forces and she was finally able to escape.

"It is difficult to forget what happened," said Nahla, who eventually returned to Sinjar after spending years in a displacement camp with her remaining relatives.

"But hope and dreams for the future should not be lost."

Ending the suffering

While ISIS was in control of Sinjar, it killed more than 5,000 Yazidis and kidnapped 6,417 others, most of them women and children, to be trafficked.

Since then, Iraqi authorities have discovered 83 mass graves in the district containing the remains of hundreds of Yazidis who were killed in cold blood.

Human remains have been exhumed from around half of these sites, and the victims have been reinterred, with special ceremonies, after undergoing genetic tests to determine their identities.

"We hope to respond quickly to the requests of the victims' families to learn the fate of their loved ones," Petrichor Organization for Human Rights head Khairi Ali Ibrahim told Al-Fassel.

"We call for action to open the graves, exhume all the victims, identify them, and rebury them to end the suffering of their families."

Meanwhile, the government is working to return displaced Yazidis to Sinjar. Of the initial 350,000 residing in camps, about half are still waiting to return.

On July 28, 463 Yazidis left Sharya camp in Dohuk to return to their villages in Sinjar, per the Iraqi Ministry of Migration and Displacement, as part of a process to ensure the voluntary return of all displaced Yazidi families.