Where can Iraq’s Yazidis live in the future? Their homeland Sinjar in the north has been liberated, but the “IS” genocide that began on August 3, 2014 has left an indelible mark on the city. Sandra Petersmann reports.

It’s as if someone had taken a huge sledgehammer and beaten the hell out of it. Ruins and yet more ruins. Pulverized concrete and smashed bricks as far as the eye can see. There is hardly anything left of Sinjar which used to be the largest city in the Yazidi homeland in northern Iraq that bears the same name.

With the backing of massive US airstrikes Kurdish fighters managed to free Sinjar city from “Islamic State” (IS) tyranny in November 2015. It had been in IS hands for just over a year. But it was above all the US air raids that almost wiped out the unofficial capital of the Yazidi homeland. The fact that the liberation was followed by more Turkish air strikes has only reinforced deep-rooted fear within the Yazidi community. There is a palpable sense of a lost homeland.

Meeting the mayor

In Sinjar, time seems to have stood still. There is no trace of organized reconstruction in the town. Compare that to Mosul, only 120 kilometers (75 miles) to the west. Iraq’s second city was freed from IS terror just a year ago, but a visible building effort is well underway. Sinjar by contrast was liberated almost three years ago. The main streets were cleared of rubble. But since then, little else has happened.

Most of the smaller settlements that surround the city are also destroyed and deserted. Herdan is one of those. On the access road to the village, four mass graves have been provisionally sealed off with flimsy green mesh fencing. Three hundred families once lived in Herdan, says village elder Hassan Khalaf. Today there are just 60. Khalaf has no idea about the whereabouts of two sons, a brother and four nephews. Are they among those buried in the mass graves? Khalaf doesn’t know. He points to the junction a short distance beyond the graves that marks the end of the village. That, he says, is where IS fighters took Yazidi villagers to execute them: “They must have taken some 500 people from here.”