SINJAR, Iraq (news agencies) — 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 media last year, soon after returning to her village, Hardan.
Reality quickly set in.
The house where she lives with her brother, a police officer, and his wife and toddler, is one of the few still standing in the village. A school down the street houses displaced families who have nowhere else to go.
Her father and younger sister are still missing. In a cemetery on the village edge, three of her brothers are buried along with 13 other local men and boys killed by IS and discovered in a mass grave.
Ismail passes it every time she has an errand to 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.
“Sinjar is the Yazidi center of gravity,” said Hadi Babasheikh, the brother and office manager of the late Yazidi spiritual leader who held the position during IS’ atrocities. “Without Sinjar, Yazidism would be like a cancer patient who’s dying.”
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 dotted with sheep, a cement factory and the occasional liquor store.
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. Here and there, 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, and even religious shrines have not been rebuilt. Sinjar town’s main Sunni Muslim district remains a stretch of rubble; the occupants have not returned, facing hostility from their former Yazidi neighbors who view them as IS collaborators.
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