Years after ISIS ouster, Iraq's Yazidis await return of abducted relatives

After paying nearly $100,000 in ransoms to free 10 family members, Khaled Taalou, a member of Iraq's Yazidi minority, is still working to free other missing relatives kidnapped by "Islamic State of Iraq and Syria" (ISIS) fighters.

Despite his efforts, five more relatives, along with thousands of other Yazidis, remain missing after being abducted by members of the extremist group.

"We are still looking. We do not lose hope," the 49-year-old journalist and writer said.

In August 2014, ISIS swept over Mount Sinjar, the Kurdish-speaking minority's historic home in northern Iraq.

They massacred thousands of Yazidi men, enlisted children and seized thousands of women to be sold as "wives" or reduced to sexual slavery.

United Nations (UN) investigators described the atrocities carried out by ISIS as genocide.

Nineteen members of Taalou's family were abducted, including his brother and sister, along with their spouses and children.

"We borrowed money as we could, here and there, to get them out," he said.

Now displaced and living in Sharya, a village in Iraq's Kurdish region, after fleeing his home in Sinjar, Taalou has managed to free 10 relatives over seven years.

Expensive releases are negotiated "via networks of traffickers in Iraq and abroad", he said.

The latest was his brother's granddaughter in February 2022, located in a Syrian camp. Five relatives remain missing, and two family members are dead.

According to Hossam Abdullah, director of the Eyzidi Organisation for Documentation, members of the Yazidi community have organised their own rescue and return operations.

In some cases families have been forced to pay out "at least $15,000 to smugglers in Syria to get them back", he told Al-Mashareq last August.

Many Yazidi girls who had been forced into marriage with ISIS elements or sold into sexual slavery ended up in Azerbaijan and Chechnya after those men returned to their home countries, he said.

Tracking them down and proving they are members of the Yazidi community who had been kidnapped or trafficked by the group have been challenging, he added.

'Eyes on the road'

The toll left behind by ISIS and its self-proclaimed caliphate is still being counted, years after the group's territorial defeat in Iraq.

According to the UN, more than 200,000 Yazidis remain displaced, most of whom live in camps in Dohuk province, northern Iraq, in challenging conditions.

Festering problems have prevented their return to Sinjar, which was liberated from ISIS in November 2015.

Mass graves in Sinjar continue to be exhumed, and the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) says more than 2,700 Yazidis remain missing.

Some are still in ISIS captivity while "the whereabouts of others is uncertain".

Bahar Elias was separated from her husband, Jassem, and their son Ahmed, who was barely 19 when the family was kidnapped when ISIS seized Sinjar.

Relatives paid intermediaries $22,000 to secure the release of Elias and her three younger sisters.

Now living in a camp for displaced persons near Sharya, the 40-year-old said she has her "eyes glued to the road" in hopes that her husband and son will return.

She appealed for international assistance to "help us find a trace of our families, to find out if they are dead or alive".

Knowing their fate would allow her "to be free from pain", she said.

'Nothing left in Sinjar'

Hussein Qaidi, director of a public office in Iraq's autonomous Kurdish region working to rescue kidnapped Yazidis, said ISIS abducted 6,417 Yazidis from Sinjar.

More than 3,500 have been rescued in Iraq or from Syria and Turkey.

He estimated 2,855 Yazidis remain missing and said his team works tirelessly to "gather the available information and free all the kidnapped".

Hayam was 17 when ISIS abducted her on August 3, 2014, along with her parents, five sisters and two brothers.

Now living in Sharya, she has managed to rebuild her life after a journey across the territory once controlled by the extremist group.

In an ISIS prison, she met Leila, a fellow Yazidi. In May 2015, Hayam was sold to a Syrian and Leila to an Iraqi.

Four months later, Hayam was given to a man from Dagestan before escaping her ordeal and reaching Iraq, after a year and a half in captivity.

She has since married Leila's brother, Marwan, and the couple and their two children have sought asylum in Australia, where Hayam has family awaiting them.

She has the word "freedom" (hurriya) tattooed on her wrist and has no intention of returning to her former home.

"Nothing awaits us in Sinjar," she said, adding that her family and friends are no longer there.

"Some were killed, others are still captives of ISIS, and others have emigrated. Everything has changed."