As a teen Hilwa* dreamed of growing up and getting married. She, her sisters and neighbours would spend hours under the sun on the flat roof of their home, in a small village in Iraqi Kurdistan, sketching the perfect dress.
“I was obsessed with fashion”, she says, anxiously plaiting the tassels on her scarf repeatedly as she speaks. But now, “I can’t even wear the clothes I want to because of this,” Hilwa, a Yazidi, moves the scarf aside and lifts her shirt to show a red rash travelling from her stomach to her chest.
The young woman was 15 when Isis arrived in her hometown of Sinjar, a decade ago in August 2014. Isis killed or abducted thousands of people. Around 5,000 Yazidis were massacred and up to 7,000 women and girls were captured and sold off.
Hilwa first developed the itchy rash she calls a “skin disease” when she was in Isis captivity. Still undiagnosed, the red sores have remained for years – acting as an unwelcome reminder of all she endured.
She gives a hint of a smile as she enters the office of the non-governmental organisation (NGO) Dak, approximately nine miles south of the city of Duhok. Petrified she could be punished for speaking out, she doesn’t want to share her identity. But sitting on a plastic chair with her hair scraped back, she tells The Independent: “If I don’t speak, who will speak for us [Yazidis]? Unless we speak for ourselves no one will hear us.” Her face is haunted. She has witnessed so much that a decade of pain in her eyes is almost too much to bear.
At one stage, Isis held a third of Iraq and neighbouring Syria before being pushed back by US-backed forces and militias and collapsing in 2019.
Yazidi Nadia Murad was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for painfully telling her story in the hope of ending the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war. The United Nations and governments around the world would later recognise what happened as a genocide, but many in the area feel that justice has not yet been done for victims.
“We are worried about justice for Yazidis in Iraq. We feel year after year it is getting less important”, Sozan Ismail, president of the Dak organisation says.
Kadry Furany, the humanitarian group CARE International’s country director for Iraq, concurs. He says: “Humanitarian funding here is in sharp decline. NGOs have left the country or totally shrunk. The services that we were able to provide in the [displaced person] camps are diminishing. Health funding in particular is limiting. It’s unfair, people deserve dignity.”
Inside the Sharya camp where Hilwa lives – among many other Yazidis – small ravines at the edge of rows of tents are filled with dense piles of rubbish and colourful blankets hanging on washing lines flutter in the breeze. For eight years, Hilwa has lived in a tent with nothing from her old life but the clothes she left Sinjar in. She fled Isis captivity in the dead of night under pouring rain after 19 months. Approximately 180,000 Yazidis remain internally displaced, mostly spread across 15 camps in this semi-autonomous Kurdish region of Iraq.
Hilwa says life in the camp is monotonous and unfulfilling. The 25-year-old dreams of studying again but is now too old to attend mainstream school. “I tried to go back to school but they asked for my reports… my house is bombed, my school is bombed,” Hilwa says looking frustrated. Many Yazidis enter adulthood without any post-primary schooling.
“Other survivors were not captured, they did not see it the way I did: not knowing if I was going to live a day longer, or someone was going to do something to me, or kill me. I never believed I would hear anyone speak Kurdish in front of me again, I thought… I would die. Going through all that and coming here [the camp] and not getting enough support, makes it really difficult”, she says.
When Hilwa and her family were loaded into pickup trucks by Isis in August 2014, she was separated from one of her sisters at a checkpoint. That day would be the last time she would ever see or hear from her beloved sister again. Her whereabouts are still unknown.
Today, about 2,700 Yazidis remain missing, according to estimates from advocacy group Yazda. There are around 300 to 400 children still alive in captivity, according to numbers compiled by human rights groups. Twisting her hands over and over as she speaks, Hilwa recalls the screams of her neighbours and people being beaten with guns as they were taken by Isis.
