Ten years later, many Yazidis uprooted by Daesh attacks are struggling to find safe, stable homes
Sinjar, Iraq: When Rihan Ismail returned to her family's home in the heart of her Yazidi community, she was sure she was returning for good.
She was longing for that moment during her long imprisonment.
IS fighters kidnapped the then-teenage Ismail and killed and enslaved thousands of the Yazidi religious minority during an attack on Iraq's Sinjar district.
When they moved her from Iraq to Syria, she clung to the meaning of home: a childhood filled with laughter, the neighbor's house as if it were your own. After her captors took her to Turkey, she finally managed to get hold of a phone, contact her family and plan a rescue.
“How can I leave again?” Ismail, 24, told The Associated Press last year as soon as she returned to her hometown of Harden.
Reality soon set in.
The house where he lived with his brother's family is one of the few still standing in the village. Nearby schools house displaced families.
His father and sister are still missing. In a local cemetery, three of his brothers are buried alongside 13 other men and boys killed by Daesh.
Ismail passes every time she works in a neighboring town.
“You feel like you're dying 1,000 deaths between here and there,” she said.
A decade after the ISIS attack, members of the Yazidi community in Sinjar have begun to return home. But despite the deep emotional and religious significance of their homeland, many see no future there.
There is no money to rebuild the destroyed houses. The infrastructure is still destroyed. Several armed groups carve out territory.
And the landscape is haunted by terrible memories. In August 2014, Sinjar was attacked by militants determined to wipe out a small, vulnerable religious group considered insurgent. They killed men and boys, sold women into sex slavery or forced them to convert and marry terrorists. Those who could, fled.
It has been seven years since ISIS was defeated in Iraq. But by April 2024, only 43 percent of the more than 300,000 people displaced from Sinjar had returned, according to the International Organization for Migration.
Some fear the community could lose its identity if the Yazidis do not return.
“Without Sinjar, Yazidism will be like a cancer patient who is dying,” said Hadi Babashekh, brother of the late Yazidi spiritual leader and office manager who held office during Daesh' atrocities.
This strategically located remote corner of northwest Iraq near the Syrian border has been home to the Yazidis for centuries. Villages are scattered across the semi-arid plains.
Rising from the plains are the Sinjar Mountains, a long, narrow range considered sacred by the Yazidis. Legend has it that Noah's ark rested on a mountain after the flood. Yazidis fled to the heights to escape Daesh, as they had done in past persecutions.
In Sinjar town, the center of the district, soldiers sit in front of small shops on the main road. Animal markets bring buyers and sellers from neighboring villages and beyond. Some reconstruction crews work on piles of cinder blocks.
But in the outlying areas, signs of devastation—destroyed houses, abandoned gas stations—remain everywhere. Water supply networks, health facilities and schools, even religious places of pilgrimage have not been reconstructed. The main Sunni Muslim district of Sinjar city is mostly in ruins.
The central government in Baghdad and authorities in the semi-autonomous northern Kurdish region are wrestling over Sinjar, where each has backed a rival local government.
That dispute is now playing out in the debate over the housing of many who fled Sinjar in displacement camps in the Kurdish region.
Earlier this year, Baghdad ordered the camps closed by July 30 and offered a payment of 4 million dinars (about $3,000) to those who leave.
Karim al-Nouri, the deputy minister for displaced persons, said this month that difficulties had been overcome to return to Sinjar. But Kurdish officials say they will not evict the camp's residents.
Sinjar “is not fit for human habitation,” said Khairy Bozani, an adviser to Kurdish regional president Nechirwan Barzani.
“Government should move people from bad places to good places, not the other way around.”
Khudida Murad Ismail refuses to leave the camp in Dohuk, where he runs a makeshift shop. Leaving would mean losing his livelihood, and the payments would not cover rebuilding his home, he said. If the camps are closed, he says he will stay in the area and look for other work.
But some are returning. On June 24, Barkat Khalil's family of nine left the city of Dohuk, their home for almost a decade.
They now live in a rented house in Sinjar city. They fixed its broken doors and windows and are slowly furnishing it, even planting geraniums. Their old house in a nearby village has been destroyed.
“We stayed there for two months and then they (IS fighters) came and blew it up,” he said.
Now, “it's a whole new life – we don't know anyone here,” said Haifa Barakat, Khalil's 25-year-old daughter. He is the only member of the family who currently works in the local hospital's pharmacy.
Although life in Sinjar is tolerable now, there are security concerns.
Different parts of the area are patrolled by Iraqi forces and Kurdish Peshmerga forces, as well as various militias that came to fight Das and never left.
Chief among them is the Sinjar Resistance Units, or YBS, a Yazidi militia that is part of the predominantly Shiite Popular Mobilization Forces.
Turkey regularly launches airstrikes against its members because it has allied with the Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK, a Kurdish separatist group that has rebelled in Turkey.
The presence of armed groups sometimes complicates reconstruction. In 2022, a damaged school in Sinjar was rehabilitated by a Japanese NGO. Instead, Japanese officials complained that a militia had taken it over.
This month, the Nineveh Provincial Council finally voted to appoint a single mayor for Sinjar, but disputes have delayed his confirmation.
Hooney mayor, school administrator and community activist Saido Al-Ahmadi said he hopes to restore services so more displaced people will return.
But many who have returned have said that they are thinking of leaving again.
On a recent evening in the village of Dugure, children rode bicycles and clothed women chatted in the sunset in front of houses.
Rihan Ismail, who once dreamed of returning to Sinjar, now wants to stay away.
“You can't forget. But at least you don't have to see your village destroyed like this every time you come or go,” she said.
