Amal Hussein, 40, is just beginning to know her 10-year-old daughter Khunaf. 

Hussein’s fingers gently trace her daughter’s small, unfamiliar face, a face she hadn’t seen since Khunaf was three months old. Their separation occurred 11 years ago when ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, also known as Daesh) invaded the predominantly Yazidi district of Sinjar in northern Iraq on August 3, 2014.

The Yazidi, a monotheistic ethnoreligious minority, worship a supreme God and venerate Melek Tawwus, the Peacock Angel, as the chief of seven archangels and a benevolent emanation of God’s light. Their faith also blends Sufi influences with ancient pre-Zoroastrian beliefs. Some Muslims have misinterpreted Melek Tawwus as Iblis, or Satan—fueling false accusations of “devil-worship” and centuries of persecution.

ISIS branded them heretics—fueling the militant group’s campaign of mass killings, enslavement, and attempted extermination.

Within days of the Sinjar takeover, thousands of Yazidis were killed; almost half were executed by shooting, beheading, or burning. The rest died from starvation, dehydration, or injuries during the ISIS siege of Mount Sinjar, where tens of thousands had sought refuge from the invasion.

Within days of the Sinjar takeover, thousands of Yazidis were killed; almost half were executed by shooting, beheading, or burning. The rest died from starvation, dehydration, or injuries during the ISIS siege of Mount Sinjar, where tens of thousands had sought refuge from the invasion. Nearly 7,000 Yazidis were kidnapped. Women and girls, some as young as nine, were sold into sexual slavery, while boys were indoctrinated as child soldiers.

In the ensuing chaos, 40 members of Hussein’s family were killed, including nearly all her male relatives: her husband, brothers, and father. Her mother, sister, and aunts were also murdered, and she became separated from her infant daughter. For five harrowing months, she endured sexual slavery in Syria before a surviving brother bought her from her captor and smuggled her into Iraq. She then found refuge in one of the numerous internally displaced persons (IDP) camps in Iraq’s northern Kurdistan Region, where over 200,000 Yazidis still live.

For years, Hussein cherished her daughter’s memory. “Not a day passed that I didn’t pray to see her again,” Hussein recounts. Her forearm bears a bold English tattoo of “Knaf,” with her husband Naif’s name in Arabic below it. “I never wanted to forget them,” Hussein tells TRNN.

More than a year ago, Hussein’s prayers were answered: Khunaf was found at the overcrowded and impoverished Al-Hol camp in Syria, which since 2016 has housed tens of thousands of displaced Syrians, Iraqis, and families of ISIS fighters who were uprooted during anti-ISIS operations in Syria. Its population skyrocketed between 2018 and 2019 as the final strongholds of the so-called Islamic State were defeated. 

To this day, the camp still shelters about 40,000 people, mainly women and children displaced by ISIS, as well as wives and children of ISIS fighters. Khunaf had spent five years at Al-Hol, still with the ISIS family who partly raised her, before her discovery.

Mother and daughter reunited weeks ago in Duhok, a city in the Kurdistan region. The child now embarks on a fragile new chapter, part of a story meant to end in her erasure and shaped by a genocide that sought to extinguish the Yazidi people.

Nearly 3,000 Yazidi women and children remain missing, many believed to be in ISIS captivity. Those rescued return with trauma that persists beyond their escape. Instead of finding safety, many return to Iraq only to end up in under-resourced camps where harsh conditions often deepen their trauma. As international aid dwindles and global attention shifts, many Yazidis feel forgotten.

A Nightmare Begins

Hussein vividly remembers the day she and Khunaf were separated—a nightmare forever etched in her memory. Hussein, along with three-month-old Khunaf and her two-year-old son, were crammed into a school with hundreds of other terrified Yazidi women and children in Kasr el-Mihrab. This village near Tal Afar was used by ISIS as a holding center for selling women and girls into sexual slavery.

Days earlier, Hussein had watched in horror as ISIS militants killed hundreds of Yazidi men and adolescent boys in her village of Kocho, in southern Sinjar. Many residents were trapped after Kurdish Peshmerga forces fled, allowing ISIS to seize escape routes from the village to Mount Sinjar.

“I could hear the gunfire,” Hussein grimaces, recalling when all her male relatives were gathered and killed. ISIS fighters reportedly used bulldozers to cover the bodies with earth. From Kocho, distraught women and children were transported to the Solagh Technical Institute, a school closer to Mount Sinjar’s base.

A grim selection process began. Meluka Khider, another survivor from Kocho, describes it to TRNN with chilling precision. “They separated us into two groups,” the 43-year-old says softly, sitting on a thin mat in her sparsely furnished Duhok home. Married women, surviving boys, and girls under nine were sent to the second floor, while unmarried women and older girls stayed on the ground floor.

ISIS fighters began selecting unmarried girls, mostly those aged 13 to 16, and took them away. Pre-pubescent boys were taken to ISIS training camps, where they were forced to convert to Islam, indoctrinated into extremist ideologies, and trained to fight.

“Then they ordered all of us into the school yard,” Khider continues monotonously. “They separated older women and the elderly from us and led them to another area.” About 15 of her relatives, including her mother, grandmother, and aunts, were in this group. Gunfire soon followed. After the area was recaptured from ISIS in 2017, a mass grave of women’s remains was uncovered in the school yard.

The next morning, ISIS fighters loaded the remaining Kocho residents—all women and children—into trucks and buses, transporting them to holding sites deeper in ISIS-controlled territory, some near Tal Afar and Mosul. From these points, women and girls would be processed and moved to larger slave markets or directly distributed to fighters as “spoils of war.” Khider went to a holding center in Qazel Qio village near Tal Afar, while Hussein, with her children and sister-in-law, went to Kasr el-Mihrab, staying two weeks.

It was there that Hussein made one of the most painful decisions of her life. “It was a catastrophe,” Hussein remembers. “It was overcrowded; no room to lie down. We had no food or water. My children cried constantly. Men would take girls, some so young.”

“I witnessed unspeakable things,” Hussein adds. “Human beings bought and sold. Small children raped. Something a normal person could never imagine.”

Khider’s 15-year-old sister was among the girls chosen by ISIS in the Qazer Qio holding center. Khider never saw her again. Women desperately tried to make themselves and their girls unattractive by rubbing dirt on their faces, hoping ISIS would not choose them. 

At the time, the petrified women believed that if they were with small children, ISIS fighters might abuse them less—a hope that proved false. Hussein’s 30-year-old sister-in-law had married her brother months earlier, but had no children. In a desperate attempt to protect her, Hussein gave her Khunaf, telling her to claim the infant as her own, while Hussein stayed with her two-year-old son.

That was the last time she saw Khunaf before they were separated and transported to different slave markets across Syria. Hussein was transferred to a slave market in Raqqa, the de facto capital of the Islamic State. She was bought and sold by four ISIS members: three from Syria and one from Kuwait. The last man agreed to sell her to one of her surviving brothers for $15,000. After payment, Hussein, along with her small son, was smuggled into Iraq.

Meanwhile, Khunaf stayed for years with Hussein’s sister-in-law, who was also sold to a fighter. She was forced to convert to Islam and marry her captor. However, unlike other Yazidis taken as infants or young children who forgot their identity in captivity, Hussein’s sister-in-law ensured Khunaf remembered her Yazidi roots.

“She always told my daughter that this [ISIS] family was not their real family and the woman was not her real mother,” Hussein says. “She ensured she knew about me as she grew up.”

“She always told my daughter that this [ISIS] family was not their real family and the woman was not her real mother,” Hussein says. “She ensured she knew about me as she grew up.” This made their reunion less tumultuous than for other families whose children returned without knowing their identity or still indoctrinated in ISIS ideologies, even hating their Yazidi community.

Khunaf is now safe in her mother’s arms. However, like many Yazidi children raised in ISIS captivity, she missed years of formal schooling and has no knowledge of Kurmanji, a Kurdish dialect spoken by Yazidis. These children face immense challenges reintegrating into the formal school system due to significant age-grade gaps, language barriers, and profound psychological trauma.

But for now, her mother’s joy softens the hardships ahead. “I didn’t know if she was alive or buried somewhere,” Hussein says. “Now I can hold her again—that’s all I’ve dreamed of for 11 years. She is one of the only family members who survived. She is a big gift to me.”

‘Lost Track of Them’

The Islamic State, once spanning 90,000 square kilometers across parts of Syria and Iraq, collapsed in 2019 when Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), backed by a US-led coalition, seized Al-Baghuz Fawqani, ISIS’s final stronghold in eastern Syria. Some Yazidi women and children were able to escape, but others were trafficked further into Syria, Iraq, or other countries like Turkey, the occupied Palestinian territory, and even Malaysia.

“When former ISIS areas were liberated, we hoped more captive Yazidis would return,” explains Abdullah Shrem, a former Yazidi beekeeper who has rescued hundreds from ISIS captivity, both during and after the caliphate’s collapse. Dozens of his own family members were kidnapped, and many remain missing.

“Ironically, our rescue missions became much more difficult,” Shrem tells TRNN. “Instead of dealing with specific Yazidi concentrations in Syria and Iraq, they are now scattered everywhere. We lost track of many.”

“We went from dealing with the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria to dealing with the entire world.”

After ISIS’s defeat, enslaved Yazidi women and children fell into the hands of other militant groups and trafficking rings, sold or abandoned by their original abductors as they fled the caliphate’s last outpost in Syria.

The lack of international or national programs to coordinate rescue operations has made locating and rescuing Yazidis across borders much harder. Before 2019, rescuing a captive Yazidi took about a week; now, Shrem says it can take months. “Many ISIS members have foreign passports, easily crossing borders,” Shrem explains. “Whereas I am an ordinary Iraqi, making it very difficult for me to move beyond my country’s borders.”

Last year, Fawzia Amin Sido, a Yazidi woman kidnapped at age 11 and sold to a Palestinian ISIS fighter who brought her to the besieged Gaza Strip after the caliphate’s fall, was rescued in a complex operation involving Israel, the United States, Iraq, and Jordan. According to Shrem, this was an extremely rare multinational effort.

“It’s actually the only case of its kind,” he says, contrasting it with individual efforts by people like himself, who operate with little official support. “It is just ordinary people doing their best to help each other and bring these people back with our simple capabilities and small resources.”

Shrem is currently working on rescuing a Yazidi woman from Syria, who was forced to marry Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, ISIS’s founder, at age nine. In June, he rescued a 24-year-old Yazidi woman who was kidnapped at 13 and made to marry an ISIS fighter from Saudi Arabia who held her captive in Turkey for years. 

Earlier this year, he assisted a Yazidi teenager escape Idlib in northeast Syria. Abducted at eight, the boy was forced to convert to Islam and sent to an ISIS training camp. Upon returning, he recounted being trained with 360 other Yazidi children, many forced into becoming suicide bombers.

Over the years, several Yazidis have been rescued from Idlib, once a rebel stronghold with various opposition factions, including Turkey-backed rebels and the dominant Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) group. HTS, formerly affiliated with Al Qaeda, saw its leader, Ahmad al-Sharaa, appointed as the new Syrian president after overthrowing Bashar al-Assad’s regime late last year.

After ISIS’s defeat, enslaved Yazidi women and children fell into the hands of other militant groups and trafficking rings, sold or abandoned by their original abductors as they fled the caliphate’s last outpost in Syria, according to Mirza Dinnayi, a prominent Yazidi social activist and co-founder and director of the humanitarian organization Air Bridge Iraq. 

“This continued to be an ongoing business,” he says. “All Islamist militant groups engaged in this dirty sex slavery. These groups continued to buy and sell them among themselves.”

Shrem tells TRNN that many Yazidis are now appearing with non-ISIS actors, and he has rescued several from militants affiliated with various groups across Syria.

Before Sharaa’s dramatic rise to power, most of these groups were clustered in Idlib, a jihadist bastion. “But now, these same men are no longer just fighters, but officials with power and high-level positions in the Syrian government,” Shrem tells TRNN. “They can go anywhere in Syria, making it harder to track down Yazidis still in their possession.”

There are no official reports linking Sharaa himself to the Yazidi slave trade, but HTS members have committed numerous abuses in Syria, including torture, sexual violence, enforced disappearances, and indiscriminate attacks on civilians. However, other figures associated with the new Syrian government do have documented links to the sexual enslavement and trafficking of Yazidis. 

Ahmad al-Hayes, also known as Abu Hatem Shaqra, a former leader of Ahrar al-Sharqiya, a Turkish-backed jihadist group, was appointed division commander in northern Syria. In 2021, he was sanctioned by the United States for serious human rights violations, including trafficking Yazidi women and children. Ahrar al-Sharqiya has also incorporated former ISIS members into its fighting force.

“Very likely, Yazidis are still held captive by these men who are now senior Syrian government members,” Shrem explains. “That will make things much more difficult for us.”

Perpetuating Genocide

Despite Hussein repatriating Khunaf from Al-Hol camp, hundreds of Yazidi women and children are believed to remain there, some trapped in conditions of captivity and slavery. An unknown number of Yazidi boys and young men abducted as children are also believed to be held in a network of at least 27 detention facilities, according to Amnesty International.

According to Dinnayi, very few Yazidis are currently being repatriated from Al-Hol. Camp administrators rely almost entirely on individual Yazidis coming forward to identify themselves. However, some are too afraid, fearing punishment or death from ISIS-affiliated people in the camp if they try to return to their families. Some were told by ISIS that their families would harm them, or were led to believe all Yazidis had been killed. Many were too young when abducted to remember their Yazidi identity now.

“There’s no coordinated effort between the Iraqi government and camp administrators to check and verify identities,” Dinnayi explains. “The camp is basically an aggressive, brainwashed ghetto of ISIS families. This prevents the administration from identifying people deep inside.”

“The Iraqi government is also not seriously working on this issue,” he adds, partly due to security risks of repatriating potentially indoctrinated individuals.

Many Yazidi women in Al-Hol also have young children from sexual violence by ISIS members. While conservative Yazidi religious leaders welcomed back kidnapped women early on, they have refused to accept children with ISIS fathers. These children are seen as a threat to the ancient religion, already endangered by the genocide, as only children born to two Yazidi parents are considered Yazidi, and conversion into the faith is not permitted.

Many Yazidi women have been separated from their children after being identified in Al-Hol. At least dozens remain stranded in exile, unable to abandon children born from their captors. Hussein’s sister-in-law, who was with Khunaf and facilitated her repatriation, also remains in Al-Hol, having given birth to a child through rape.

According to Dinnayi, Iraqi law further complicates matters for Yazidi women returning with children born from sexual violence. Iraq’s National Card Law designates children born to at least one Muslim parent as Muslim, including those born of ISIS rape. Iraqi law does not permit conversion from Islam. Experts warn that legally preventing these children from being recognized as Yazidi hinders their return to their homeland and communities, effectively perpetuating ISIS’s genocidal aim of erasing the Yazidi.

“The legal system itself creates a situation where the mother cannot raise the child within the Yazidi faith or community if she wishes to maintain her Yazidi identity.”

“The legal system itself creates a situation where the mother cannot raise the child within the Yazidi faith or community if she wishes to maintain her Yazidi identity,” Dinnayi explains. This process serves as an official state attempt to coerce Yazidi women into converting to Islam, he adds.

For rescued Yazidis, returning to Iraq often marks the beginning of another difficult chapter, not the end of their ordeal. Carrying serious psychological burdens from captivity, they face a severe lack of adequate psychosocial and economic support in Iraq, according to Shivan Sulaiman, a Yazidi researcher based in Duhok.

“Imagine someone experiencing such difficulty in ISIS captivity, then returning home to an IDP camp and living in a tent,” Sulaiman tells TRNN. “Many Yazidi survivors commit suicide due to insufficient psychological support. Harsh camp conditions can cause flashbacks and worsen their psychological state.”

The Iraqi government passed the Yazidi Survivors Law (YSL) in 2021, providing a reparations framework for many ISIS crime survivors, especially women and girls subjected to sexual violence, and child survivors abducted before 18. Despite this, observers note that the complex needs of survivors remain largely unmet. 

“The Yazidi community’s needs are simply too great,” Dinnayi says. “The challenges we face are profound and already far exceed available support and resources.”

Dinnayi, who spearheaded a year-long deradicalization initiative for Yazidi former child soldiers in 2020, states no organizations currently work on deradicalizing Yazidis returning after being kidnapped as children and trained as fighters. “Families are left entirely alone to deal with radicalized relatives,” he explains. “They must rely solely on themselves and their traditional social structures.”

According to some Yazidis in Duhok, former child soldiers repatriated to the community still retain extremist ideologies years after their return.

The International Organization for Migration (IOM) reports over 100,000 Yazidis have returned to their ancestral home in Sinjar, where competing militias and political forces continue to jostle for power. But most of the population remains displaced. Many are trapped in camps because their homes in Sinjar were destroyed by ISIS, and they lack resources to rebuild. Others cannot cope with the memories and flashbacks of the horrors that befell their villages over a decade ago.

President Donald Trump’s dramatic cuts to USAID earlier this year, slashing around 90 percent of funding to the agency’s global programs, have worsened an already bleak situation for the Yazidis. Some crucial organizations in Sinjar and Duhok working on reconstruction, mental health, education, and emergency relief have been forced to close or significantly reduce capacity, Sulaiman explains. “Some people in the camps can no longer buy medicine or milk for their children,” he tells TRNN.

According to Dinnayi, the USAID cuts have also caused a domino effect for numerous local and international humanitarian organizations assisting the Yazidi community, which were indirectly supported by USAID-funded groups.

‘Can’t Heal’

For Yazidis in Iraq, fear remains a constant presence—shadowing them into their homeland’s remnants and the harsh confines of IDP camps. Deep distrust lingers for their surrounding Muslim neighbors, stemming from genocide trauma. Hearing the adhan, the Muslim call to prayer, causes terror in camp residents’ hearts, while Yazidi children sometimes cry upon hearing the melodic call from mosques.

“No Yazidi in this country feels safe,” Dinnayi tells TRNN. “We feel like all it takes is a small branch breaking and the genocide will resume.”

With UNITAD’s abrupt closure last year and aid cuts forcing humanitarian organizations to shutter, Yazidis feel increasingly exposed, abandoned, and left to navigate trauma and insecurity alone.

In 2023, hate speech targeting Yazidis surged on social media after a fabricated story claimed Yazidis had set a mosque ablaze in Sinjar. Last year, during a Yazidi genocide commemoration, a remark by a Yazidi Peshmerga Commander was perceived as offensive to Islam, sparking widespread outrage. This led to another surge of hate speech against Yazidis, with some Sunni clerics and religious figures encouraging violence against displaced Yazidis in IDP camps. Fearing renewed genocide, thousands of Yazidis fled the camps, many returning to Sinjar despite having no homes.

For many Yazidis, the presence of international bodies in Iraq offered a rare sense of protection. Among them was UNITAD—the UN Investigative Team tasked with collecting evidence of ISIS crimes, including the genocide against Yazidis. However, with UNITAD’s abrupt closure last year and aid cuts forcing humanitarian organizations to shutter, Yazidis feel increasingly exposed, abandoned, and left to navigate trauma and insecurity alone.

“I still wake up hoping my experience was a horrible, prolonged nightmare,” Khider tells TRNN. 

After her initial capture from Kocho 11 years ago, she was taken to Syria and first sold to a Kuwaiti ISIS commander who enslaved her for 18 months. “He constantly abused and raped me,” Khider recounts. “If I resisted, he would beat me.”

She was then sold at least eight more times in under two months via WhatsApp and Telegram groups where photos of women and girls were posted for sale. “Some men kept me for one week, some three days, before selling me,” she recounts quietly. 

She was then bought by a Saudi ISIS fighter named “Abu Sa’ad,” who was heavily involved in buying and selling Yazidi girls. He held her captive in Raqqa for three and a half years. “I was his only long-term Yazidi captive, but he constantly bought and sold many girls, raping them for a day before selling them,” she remembers. 

Khider tried to escape ten times, she says, but each time was caught and dragged back to Abu Sa’ad’s home, where he punished her with gang rapes. Khider recounts the hopelessness she felt with each desperate attempt to flee. “Everyone around me in Raqqa was an ISIS supporter; no one showed sympathy. They always just returned me to my captor.”

“One day, I saw a dog laying under a tree’s shade,” she continues. “And I wished I was in his place. It would have been better to be born a dog than a Yazidi woman.”

In 2018, as ISIS rapidly lost territory, Abu Sa’ada sought ransom for her, eventually selling her to surviving family members via Telegram for $17,000.

A few years ago, Khider learned her father’s and two brothers’ DNA matched bodies found in mass graves in Kocho. For the first time since the genocide, she returned to her village for a ceremonial burial of the unearthed remains. “I saw my family’s home,” Khider tells TRNN, her lips trembling. “All the memories of what happened came back. I just remember screaming, shouting, and losing all control.”

Due to the trauma, Khider says she can never return to Kocho. To this day, several of her relatives are missing, including her sister, taken at 15. Despite the years since her escape, the past still haunts her. 

“I can’t sleep without medication,” she says, covering her face with her palms. “I have many psychological problems. I haven’t healed and don’t know if I ever will. I’m always overthinking.”

“I cannot trust Muslims ever again,” she adds, expressing the deep trauma most Yazidis carry due to ISIS justifying horrors through Islam and the complicity of some local Sunni Arab and Kurdish tribes who aided ISIS. “Because no one did this to us except them. Even when I begged for help, no one helped me.”

“I want the world to keep hearing our stories,” she continues. “We are still held captive by ISIS and not safe in Iraq. I pray the world doesn’t forget us because it’s only a matter of time before they kill us again.”