Truthout is an indispensable resource for activists, movement leaders and workers everywhere. Please make this work possible with a quick donation.

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. 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 beside 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.

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........

© Truthout