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AAs a teenager, Silva* dreamed of getting married when she grew up. She, her sisters and their neighbors would spend hours in the sun on the flat roof of their home in a small village in Iraqi Kurdistan, painting the perfect wedding dress.
“I’m obsessed with fashion,” she said, anxiously knitting the fringe of her scarf. But now, “I can’t even wear what I want to wear because of this,” Silva said. Yazidimoving her scarf aside and lifting her shirt to reveal a red rash that stretched from her abdomen to her chest.
When the young woman was 15 Islamic State Arrived at her hometown SinjarTen years ago, in August 2014, ISIS killed or abducted thousands of people. About 5,000 Yazidis were massacred, and up to 7,000 women and girls were captured and sold.
Silva first developed an itchy rash, which she calls a “skin disease,” while in captivity with the Islamic State. Undiagnosed, the red sores have persisted for years — an unpleasant reminder of what she’d been through.
She flashes a smile as she walks into the offices of the NGO Dak, about nine miles south of the city of Dohuk. She doesn’t want to share her identity because she’s afraid she’ll be punished for speaking out. But she sits in a plastic chair, her hair pulled back, and tells The Independent: “If I don’t speak, who will speak for us (Yazidis)? No one will hear us unless we speak for ourselves.” Her face is filled with sadness. She has seen so much, and the pain in her eyes over a decade is almost too much to bear.
Islamic State once occupied a third of Iraq and neighboring Syria before being pushed back by U.S.-backed forces and militias and collapsed in 2019.
Nadia Murad, a Yazidi woman, won the Nobel Peace Prize for speaking out about her experience in the hope of ending sexual violence as a weapon of war. The United Nations and governments around the world later recognised it as a genocide, but many in the region believe justice has yet to be served on the victims.
“We are concerned about whether the Yazidis in Iraq can get justice. We feel that this is becoming more important every year,” Sozan Ismail, chairman of the Daq, told The Independent.
Kadry Furany, Iraq country director for humanitarian organization CARE International, agrees. “Humanitarian funding here is decreasing dramatically. NGOs have left the country or have shrunk completely. The services we can provide in the (displaced persons) camps are decreasing. Funding for health care is especially limited. This is not fair, people deserve dignity,” he says.
In the Sharia camp, where Silva and many other Yazidis live, gullies around the rows of tents are filled with trash and colorful blankets hung from clotheslines flutter in the breeze. For eight years, Silva has lived in a tent with no belongings but the clothes she wore when she left Sinjar. She escaped Islamic State captivity in the dead of night in pouring rain 19 months later. Some 180,000 Yazidis remain internally displaced, mostly in 15 camps in this semiautonomous Kurdish region of Iraq.
Life in the camp is drab and unfulfilling, says Silva. At 25, she dreams of studying again but is now too old to attend mainstream schools. “I tried to go back to school but they asked me to give a report… My house was bombed, my school was bombed,” Silva says in frustration. Many Yazidis reach adulthood without any primary education.
“Other survivors who were not captured did not see it the same way I did: not knowing if I would live another day or if someone would do something to me, or kill me. I never thought I would hear someone speaking Kurdish in front of me again, I thought… I was going to die. It was really hard to go through it all, to be here (at the camp) and not have enough support,” she told The Independent.
In August 2014, Silva was separated from one of her sisters at a checkpoint as she and her family were loaded onto trucks by ISIS. That day was the last time she saw or heard from her beloved sister. Her whereabouts remain unknown.
The rights group Yazda estimates that about 2,700 Yazidis are missing. According to human rights groups, about 300 to 400 children are still being held. As he spoke, Silva twisted his hands repeatedly, recalling the screams of neighbors and the people who were beaten with guns by the Islamic State.
“When we escaped from the camp, we thought we would have a better life, but life in the camp is really hard,” Silva said. “There are no services, no support from the government, no health care system. We never knew what psychologists and psychological problems were before ISIS came. Now it’s not only psychological problems, but also physical problems.”
Kutcher, 50, was awakened in the middle of the night by a sharp pain in her abdomen. She had just sat down on a colorful mat in her tent in the Essyan camp, about 25 miles from Shariah, and asked her husband to get medicine and a prescription for kidney stones. Kutcher also suffers from high blood pressure and hypertension. Medical care in the camp is poor, forcing the Yazidi woman to seek treatment at a private hospital in Dohuk.
The medication cost Kutcher and her husband Kudel, 53, around 70,000 Iraqi dinars (£42). Kudel was told he needed a kidney stone removed urgently, but they could not afford the surgery. Their main source of income is the 170,000 Iraqi dinars Kudel receives every two months from his pension.
Kutcher recently opened a clothing store in the camp where she lives. It is located on a dusty road that runs through the middle of the settlement, next to a barber shop, a few clothing stores and a small teahouse where men gather to play board games.
The shop is made of corrugated metal, with intense heat coming in from the roof and dust filling the air, with temperatures well over 50 degrees Celsius. “I have to stand the heat or we can’t buy tomatoes,” says Kutcher. The income from selling five to 10 garments a week (a top costs about the equivalent of £3) not only helps to supplement her husband’s pension, but also allows her to temporarily forget the atrocities of the Islamic State.
Earlier this year, Baghdad ordered the closure of all refugee camps in Iraqi Kurdistan by July 30, offering compensation of around £4,000 to anyone who left. But Kurdish authorities have refused to agree to the order, and recently there have been reports that the regional government has reached an agreement with the office of Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed al-Sultanni to postpone the closure until the end of the year.
With no other sources of information except rumors from inside the camp, Kutcher desperately wanted to know if the camp was still closed. She was relieved to hear that the closure had been extended. Despite Sinjar’s deep emotional and religious significance for the Yazidis, many are afraid to go back. Kuder missed his tomato and cucumber crops, but said if they went back to Sinjar, “we would die.”
Once a place full of fond memories, Sinjar is now riddled with landmines. Successive Iraqi governments have promised to rebuild the town and village, but none have done so. The area is patrolled by various militias.
Silva is eager to join her brother in Australia. She lights up with genuine joy when she talks about the prospect. She is awaiting a final interview to get her visa, but her smile quickly fades when she thinks of friends who have been waiting since 2016 to move.
“Every day I live I think it will be my last, and now I live in a refugee camp, I am grateful to be alive and free, but life is still difficult,” Silva said. “We lack basic services, I wish we had more opportunities. I want to live with dignity and leave the trauma behind.”
*Names have been changed to protect identities
CARE International and its partner Lotus Flower provide assistance to internally displaced persons. Donations can be Made Here
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