As the Islamic State swept through northern Syria and Iraq, the Yazidi were among the hardest hit by their intolerance and ideas of religious purity. This family’s story is indicative of the hardships the Yazidis went through as they fled for their lives.
This story was originally published on Medium for UNICEF.
“Do you want to hear how we came here? Would that be of interest to you?”
I’m sitting on the floor of Elias’s house at the top of a hill on the outskirts of the town of Zakho which sits next to the Syrian/Turkish/Iraqi border.
For most of my visit, the only light is the sunlight filtering through cracks in the wall and ceiling. It’s dark and very quiet, filled only with Elias’s voice, and the rustles and murmurs of his wife, fifteen children, ten grandchildren and assorted in-laws. My camera captures the blurs of constantly moving people in the semi-darkness. This is a family that is accustomed to being on the move.
“We’re from Wardiya. It’s by Sinjar mountain. We’re Yazidi. Have you heard of Yazidis?”
“We never had problems with our neighbors before. We ate the same food. We shared the area. But when ISIL came and said Kurdish speakers (like us) were infidels, they turned on us.”
“Then, when we heard ISIL was getting close, we left our homes in Wardiya and fled toward the mountain. All the other roads were blocked. We stayed the night in a valley and then left on foot towards Sinjar again the next morning. The whole family was captured and brought back to the valley.
“ISIL left to go take Sinjar. There were the bombardments — we could hear them going ‘boom, boom, boom.’”
He pauses for effect between each ‘boom’.
“So we were able to escape. As we were running, ISIL came and tried to capture us again. They took four of my nephews and two of my wives. We still don’t know what happened to them.”
At this point, Elias’s story-teller hands go still and his voice silent. His one remaining wife, Miriam, picks up the tale.
“I was seven months pregnant at the time and we were running for our lives through the night. As if pregnancy wasn’t hard enough. We lost two of the children when we were fleeing. An 8 year old boy and a 4 year old girl. They got separated from us while we were running.”
She shows us her daughter and son’s identity cards, and two innocent faces look up at me. For this family, these small cards are the only tangible reminder they have of their children.
Miriam continues. “Four days after we escaped the second time, we looped back around to find our lost children. We found their bodies on the side of the road. That’s when we knew we had to leave altogether.”
15 year old Adnan (center), one of Elias’s sons, continues in broken English. “I was only 12 then. But I had one child on my back, and was holding two more by the hand — one on each side. It was very hard.”
One of Elias’s daughters-in-law bakes bread for the family out front of the house they share near Zakho. She escaped Wardiya with the rest of Elias’s family. Two of Elias’s wives were captured and their whereabouts remain unknown.
The so-called Islamic State was documented regularly carrying out the worst forms of gender-based violence, selling women and girls into slavery, kidnapping, carrying out sex trafficking, performing underaged marriages and more. Yazidi women were a particularly hard-hit target of this predatory behavior.
The recent past and relative geographic isolation of Yazidis means child protection concerns remain paramount for children inside the Yazidi community and for those who continue to be held by ISIL.
Though Wardiya has been retaken, Elias is not optimistic about returning.
“I don’t think people my age will be able to live peacefully with our neighbors again in the same way. We know what each person has done to us. We knew them our whole lives! But the young kids who don’t remember might be able to overcome the past.”
While their childhoods have largely been defined by persecution, these children offer the prospect of a future that starts to move beyond sectarian conflict. With an extremely complex geo-political situation and generational trauma, the road to peace will be a fraught and difficult one.