This summer, Iraqi forces finally drove ISIS out of Mosul and most of
northern Iraq. But for the Yazidis, a long persecuted religious and
ethnic minority who practice a faith with pre-Zoroastrian roots and
Islamic and Christian influences, stability is still a distant prospect. ISIS militants consider the Yazidis infidels and have subjected them to
systematic killings, rape, and pillage. In the summer of 2014, ISIS killed hundreds, possibly thousands, of Yazidis; more than fifty thousand
survivors fled to Sinjar Mountain, in the baking August heat. Three
thousand Yazidis remain in ISIS captivity, but as ISIS has lost
territory, international interest in them has faded.

Leila, who was twenty-three, was enslaved by ISIS, one of six thousand
Yazidis who were captured in Sinjar. She was taken with other Yazidi
women to Raqqa, Syria. She was moved again, and a Sunni Arab farmer from
a village near Sinjar bought her. She knew the man—he had been like a
godparent to Leila and her brothers when she was a child. Leila thought
he would save her. Instead, after three days, he sold her to an ISIS military commander, who kept her in captivity for more than a year and
regularly raped and tortured her. Her captor, she told me, did “a lot of
terrible things—actions against God.”

In the spring of 2016, Leila, whose name has been changed to protect her
privacy, managed to contact a smuggler, who guided her to freedom in
Iraqi Kurdistan. Seven months after her escape, she was living in a
small camp for displaced Yazidis under a string of mountains in Iraqi
Kurdistan. In the first days and weeks after her escape from ISIS, Leila
felt relieved to be free and back with her family. When I met her again
later, relief was giving way to shock and a struggle to communicate. She
experienced nightmares and flashbacks, and began worrying constantly
that ISIS fighters would kidnap her again. I met her soon after her
release, and then saw her mental state deteriorate. The Yazidi religious
authorities welcomed back those who had been ISIS slaves, but, as Leila
told me, readjusting to family life was difficult. “The Yazidis will
never recover,” she said. “Even if we marry or fall in love, there
will still be this thing inside that is broken.”

Today, most Yazidis remain displaced in camps and temporary shelters in
the Kurdistan region of northern Iraq. Some have returned to Sinjar, but
they live in fear of further violence. Over the last three years,
different armed groups have taken control of different parts of the Sinjar
district. In 2014, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or P.K.K., which has
battled the Turkish government for decades, fought through ISIS-held
territory alongside Syrian allies and opened a land corridor to Syria,
allowing thousands of Yazidis stranded on Sinjar Mountain to escape. In
2015, fighters from Iraq’s Kurdistan Regional Government, known as
peshmerga, retook the city of Sinjar from ISIS. Now the P.K.K. refuses to
leave Sinjar. In response, forces backed by the Kurdistan Democratic
Party, the main player in the Kurdistan Regional Government, have
restricted the passage of goods through its checkpoints to Sinjar,
preventing the destroyed city from being rebuilt, although, according to
locals, restrictions have somewhat eased recently. Continued fighting
with ISIS and a lack of funding from the cash-strapped Kurdistan
Regional Government, the Iraqi government, and the international
community have also slowed rebuilding.

Earlier this summer, Iraqi state-backed Shiite militias, with Yazidi
recruits, drove ISIS out of a strip of Yazidi towns and villages south
of Sinjar. The militias operating around Sinjar have recruited, trained,
and armed local Yazidis with the assistance of their regional backers.
Today, the brightly colored flags of various groups flutter above their
respective checkpoints, which are sometimes only metres apart along
roads not long ago controlled by ISIS. This spring, clashes broke out
between the P.K.K. and peshmerga-backed forces, leaving at least four
dead. When pro-P.K.K. Yazidis protested the violence, a Kurdistan
Democratic Party-backed militia shot at least one demonstrator. In
April, Turkish air strikes aimed at P.K.K. bases injured at least one
Yazidi fighter and mistakenly killed at least five Kurdish peshmerga.
The violence and myriad checkpoints have created a sense among Yazidis
that they are pawns in a regional power struggle. As Sabah, a
thirty-year-old nurse who was briefly captured by ISIS, told me, “Sinjar
is divided into three parts, and everyone has a gun.” In the vast
majority of my conversations with Yazidis, they told me that they would leave
Iraq if they could. They complained that the bodies of their male
relatives remained in shallow graves at massacre sites around Sinjar.
Three years after they died in mass executions, the Yazidi men haven’t
been exhumed because of a dispute between Iraqi and Kurdish officials
over jurisdiction.

“We want to go somewhere safe,” Mehbed, a fifty-seven-year-old Yazidi
woman, told me as she rocked her granddaughter to sleep inside their
half-built home underneath a low ridge of hills in Iraqi Kurdistan. Her
husband ekes out a living growing cucumbers and tomatoes in their
garden. ISIS left makeshift bombs and ruined homes. The bodies of ISIS fighters still remain in their neighbor’s house and the mass graves are still full, Mehbed’s husband, Barakat, told me. “Those villages are gone
forever,” he said.

This July, Iraqi forces found a thirteen-year-old Yazidi boy in the
rubble of Mosul’s Old City while the battle for the city was ongoing.
Emad Tammo had spent the past three years as a slave for ISIS fighters
who forced him to carry ammunition and fetch water at front lines across
the caliphate. When I met Emad, in his family’s sparse concrete house
north of Mosul, he could barely speak, and his small body looked fragile
after only eating small pieces of dates for months. I sat with him on
the edge of a narrow bed while he played video games, his body curled
over as if in self-defense.

Emad told me that during his years in captivity, shrapnel from a mortar
lacerated his stomach, a bullet hit his elbow, and debris from a
blown-apart building hit his head after an air strike. “Some of them
were beating and insulting me, and some of them were a little better than
others,” he told me, of the ISIS fighters. “It depended on who I was
with.”

Emad seemed to be finding it hard to engage with his family. His uncle,
Hadi Tammo, told me that Emad’s small cousins, who played in a back room
of the house, had escaped from ISIS captivity last year. “I’m worried
about him,” Hadi told me. Another six members of his family, including
Emad’s brother and father, are still either missing or dead. Emad’s
mother had travelled to Canada after escaping ISIS herself, last year.
After I met Emad, a Canadian government program for vulnerable Yazidis
agreed to fly him to Canada. On August 17th, he arrived in
Winnipeg and was reunited with his mother.

Toward the end of the Mosul offensive this July, when only pockets of the city remained under ISIS control, I tried to find the Galaxy wedding
hall, on the east bank of the Tigris River, where ISIS fighters had held
thousands of Yazidi captives, including Emad, at different times. The
wedding hall, which was a popular venue before ISIS, sits near a wooded
road with fair stalls and cafés. Yazidis had told me that they were kept
there with little food and no privacy and that, as they waited, they
experienced a growing feeling of dread. Thousands of women and children
held in the Galaxy were sold by ISIS in Mosul, or sent to prisons in
Raqqa. When I eventually came upon the hall, it lay in ruins
after an air strike.

One woman told me that, while she waited in the wedding hall, she feared
that ISIS would sell her teen-age stepdaughter to an ISIS fighter.
Frantic, she ordered the girl to go into the bathroom and have sex with
a male Yazidi captive. The mother thought that if her stepdaughter were
no longer a virgin, it would save her from rape by ISIS. “We destroyed
her . . . I didn’t have another solution,” she told me. The shame of her
stepdaughter losing her virginity to a non-Yazidi man would have been
worse, she insisted. When I met the woman last year, she was living in a
two-room house in northern Iraq with other relatives who had managed to
escape. Her stepdaughter remained in captivity.

Nergez, a thirty-six-year-old former ISIS slave, was also waiting for
information about the fate of her two teen-age daughters and teen-age
son, who remained in ISIS captivity. She told me that she was following
the news of battles against ISIS in Syria and Iraq. Her village was
recently liberated, but Nergez, who declined to give her full name,
continued living in a small blue tent on the edge of a large camp for
displaced Yazidis in Iraqi Kurdistan. “Why would we go back to our
village?” she told me, as she sat beside a group of female relatives.
“It is just as terrible there as it is here, and I still don’t know
where my children are.”

Leila told me that she didn’t understand the priorities of the
countries leading the war on ISIS. She wondered why such a large emphasis
has been placed on winning back land instead of people. “Sometimes I
watch the TV and I see the news of the army taking more land and
villages,” Leila told me, explaining her confusion and pain that most
Yazidis are still imprisoned. “We know most of them are in Raqqa, so why
are they not going to save them there? Why are they taking these empty
villages?”