Iraq's missing Yazidis: Inside the long search for Islamic State captives

Aydin Hadid Talal thought his whole family had been killed in Islamic State’s ferocious assault on Iraq’s Yazidi religious minority a decade ago.

Then last year, the 20-year-old started receiving messages from a Facebook account he didn’t recognize, asking about his missing brother, Rojin.

“Can you give me a call?” the person asked.

“No, I can’t. I don’t know you,” Aydin said.

“I’m Rojin,” came the response.

Reunited at long last

The last time Aydin had seen his younger brother was in March 2019, when they were both captives of IS in Syria. He asked to see a picture to confirm it was Rojin. It was. They then spent more than two hours on a video call.

They were eager to reunite, but it wouldn’t be easy.

Rojin, who is 18, was working in Idlib, a city in northwestern Syria that is a last bastion of anti-government rebels and Islamist extremists with ties to al-Qaeda and IS. To reach his brother, Rojin would have to cross into an area controlled by the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces, a Kurdish-led Syrian militia, then over the border to the Yazidi heartland in northern Iraq. And he had no identification and no travel documents.

Ten years after Islamic State’s brutal campaign against the Yazidis spurred the United States to send its military back to Iraq to halt its advance and try to avert a genocide, hundreds of families are still desperate to reunite with missing relatives captured and enslaved during the group’s reign.

Islamic State deemed the Yazidis’ ancient faith heretical. IS’s heavily armed fighters sought to kill or subjugate Yazidi followers after overrunning their heartland in Iraq’s northwestern district of Sinjar in 2014.

By 2019, the US-led coalition and local partners had driven IS out of territory the extremists seized in Iraq and Syria for their self-declared caliphate. But survivors and activists say it has largely been left to families and a handful of improvised rescue networks to find and bring home thousands of loved ones.

Reuters traveled to Sinjar and across Iraq’s northern Kurdistan region, where hundreds of thousands of Yazidis sought sanctuary in 2014, to report on the search. This account is based on interviews with more than 20 people, including former captives, family members, smugglers, community leaders and government officials.

They described a slow, difficult quest that often ends in heartbreak.

 Thousands killed

Iraqi officials say more than 5,000 Yazidis, most of them men and older women, were killed in the initial assault in August 2014, their bodies dumped in mass graves.

Some 6,400 others, mainly women and children, were captured. Sold into domestic and sexual slavery or trained as fighters and suicide bombers, they were passed from owner to owner across the group’s “caliphate,” which at its peak spanned roughly a third of Iraq and Syria.

At least 3,584 of the captives eventually escaped or were freed, according to an office set up by Nechirvan Barzani, president of Kurdistan, to coordinate rescues.

Of the nearly 2,600 still missing, most are feared dead – either killed by their captors or in battles between IS and its foes.

But every few months, news of more survivors reverberates through the community, which counts around a million members, just under half of them in Iraq.

In October, US and Iraqi officials announced that a 21-year-old Yazidi woman kidnapped by IS a decade ago was evacuated from the Gaza Strip in a secret operation that involved Israel.

The Hamas militant group, which ruled Gaza before it went to war with Israel last year, said the woman married a Palestinian who fought alongside Syrian opposition groups and moved to Gaza with her in-laws after he was killed. She was one of 14 former captives reunited with relatives in Iraq this year, the rescue office said.

Yazidi activists believe others are still held by IS militants and family members, or have started new lives in Syria, Turkey and beyond. Estimates range from a few hundred to over 1,000.

Many were taken as young children and have little or no recollection of where they are from, rescuers and former captives said. Raised in the extreme ideology of Islamic State, some do not want to return to their community. Others fear they will be rejected or separated from the children they had with IS fighters who enslaved them.

Yazidis who convert or marry outside the faith, even under duress, were traditionally exiled. That was a product, in part, of centuries of persecution that elders say has made the community fearful for its survival. Rape can also be viewed as a stain on a family’s honor.

After the IS assault, religious leaders issued new edicts allowing women and girls who had been forced into sexual slavery to be baptized back into the faith at the Lalish temple complex in northwestern Iraq, the holiest site for Yazidis. But children fathered by the militants are not welcome.

“Their blood is Daesh blood,” said Luqman Sleiman, a Lalish spokesperson, using the Arabic acronym for Islamic State. “When they grow up, they will kill.”

Iraqi law presents another hurdle, Sleiman said. It states that children inherit the religion of their fathers, and Yazidis do not accept converts.

Yazidis practice a monotheistic religion that has elements in common with many Middle Eastern faiths, including Islam, Christianity and Zoroastrianism. A central figure is Melek Taus, a peacock angel that IS and other detractors have likened incorrectly to Satan, contributing to accusations that they worship the devil. Yazidis say the angel is a benevolent figure entrusted by God to care for the world.

Some community activists say finding abducted Yazidis has not been a priority for Iraq’s government and its allies.

“There is no systematic effort from Iraq or the international community to rescue captives,” said Murad Ismael, a co-founder and former executive director of the US-based advocacy group Yazda who now runs an education initiative in Sinjar.

Ismael said rivalries between different governing bodies, including the Iraqi federal government, Kurdish regional authorities in northern Iraq and their Kurdish counterparts in Syria, mean there is little cooperation among them.

He also accused the US-led coalition of doing too little to free Yazidis. The coalition is now expected to wrap up operations in Iraq by September 2025, though the mission will continue in Syria.

The US State Department said in a statement to Reuters that Washington has worked for years to free kidnapped Yazidis and facilitate their return to safety.

“We are determined to find them, to learn their fates, and to rescue those who remain alive,” US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in July, adding that Washington has invested some $500 million in supporting the recovery of communities most affected by IS.

Khalaf Sinjari, who advises Iraq’s prime minister on Yazidi affairs, agreed that not enough had been done by previous governments, saying resources were stretched, and the priority was defeating IS. But he said the government has now formed a committee to work on the cases of missing Yazidis and is coordinating with partners.

Dindar Zebari, who coordinates international advocacy for the Kurdistan regional government, said it remained dedicated to locating and returning Yazidis and was “working closely with international agencies to address these complex cases”.

He acknowledged that Baghdad has taken steps to support Yazidis but said improved cooperation with Kurdistan could help expedite rescues. There was no coordination between his government and Kurdish counterparts in Syria, he added.

Khairi Bozani, who heads the Kurdistan leader’s rescue office, said his team has urged Kurdish authorities in Syria to set aside political differences that have hampered rescue efforts, but there was little communication with them.

The Kurdish-led autonomous administration in northern Syria and its military wing, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), did not comment.

Back from the grave

Aydin and Rojin were captured with their parents and two younger siblings on the first day of the militants' assault on Sinjar on Aug. 3, 2014. Fighters intercepted their car as they tried to flee Hardan village, they told Reuters.

Their father agreed to convert to Islam at gunpoint, but the decision did not win the family much reprieve, they said. For months, they were moved from one makeshift detention facility to the next.

One day in the nearby city of Tal Afar, their father was summoned with other Yazidi men to a mosque, the brothers said. They never returned.

Soon after, Aydin was sent to a religious institute, then an IS military academy. Rojin was sold into domestic slavery with their mother and siblings but said a Saudi fighter later took him from her to raise as his own.

As IS began losing territory, the brothers were moved back and forth between Iraq and Syria, ending up in the Syrian village of Baghouz. When the militants made a last stand there in March 2019, Aydin, just 15 then, tried to convince his 13-year-old brother to flee to the SDF forces closing in on them.

“It was literally hell. You could get hit at any moment,” Aydin recalled.

But his brother, schooled in IS’s apocalyptic beliefs, said he was ready to die.

“His head was like stone. In one ear and out the other,” Aydin said.

The Saudi fighter later fled, leaving Rojin behind. Alone and afraid, Rojin said he persuaded an IS family to take him in, posing as their son when they surrendered to Kurdish forces.

They were sent with thousands of other IS family members to a detention camp called al-Hol, he said. But after a couple months, the Saudi fighter arranged for Rojin to be smuggled to the nearby city of Hasakah on the back of a motorbike, then on to a contact in Idlib.

Camp authorities declined to answer questions about individual cases.

Rojin said he welcomed the chance to escape the bleak desert camp, but when the contact left Idlib, he was on his own again.

He found a place to stay in a house with other displaced young people. They were kind to him, he said, and helped him find work as a security guard at a local café.

For four years, he lived hand to mouth, working long hours for little pay. He never forgot his family, though. When he had saved enough money, he bought a smartphone, which he used to search for them online.

That’s how he found Aydin, who was living with an uncle in Khanke, a town in the semi-autonomous Kurdish zone of northern Iraq.

The uncle, Saeed Talal, contacted the Kurdish rescue office. Talal said the office introduced the family to a local smuggler and agreed to cover the $3,000 fee to transport Rojin in a delivery truck to Kurdish territory.

He was then taken to Yazidi House, a social and cultural institution where former captives go through a deradicalisation process before rejoining the community in Iraq. Their phones are taken away, and they are placed in the home of a local family to learn about Yazidi customs and beliefs.

“The aim is to slowly get the people to let go of their past beliefs and return to the Yazidi faith by being immersed in the culture,” said Ismail Dalf, who co-heads Yazidi House. “It is very hard for a lot of them – they want to pray five times a day; they want to have a Quran.”

Dalf said it would be unsafe to send them home indoctrinated with their captors’ beliefs. “Sinjari society is tough,” he said. “There would be a response if the person does Islamic prayers or something like that.”

Rojin said he found the process exhausting and started to despair he would ever see his family. While in captivity, he said, he had adopted a new identity: Rojin from Sinjar became Abdullah from Syria. It took time to shed that identity, but now, he said, “I do feel a new persona has been born. I am 100%, maybe 95% Rojin.”

On Dec. 14, 2023 – after nearly a month with the host family – his uncle arrived to drive him back to Iraq.

It had been nine years since he last saw a man he thought of as a second father. They hugged and cried.

“I thought he was gone,” Saeed recalled, sitting with his nephews on mattresses in their sparsely furnished two-room house. “Then he emerged as if back from the grave.”

 The search

When Islamic State was at its peak between 2014 and 2016, there were many such rescues. Yazidis with contacts in IS-held territory built networks of informants and smugglers to get people out.

Abdallah Shrem, a Sinjar beekeeper, is credited by Yazidi activists with arranging over 400 rescues. Shrem said he worked with smugglers who brought cigarettes into IS territory and would pay them four times their usual fee to bring Yazidis out. His network grew to include bakers, waste collectors and others with access to homes where Yazidis were held.

Back then, it was easier to find captives, Shrem said. IS followers would post photographs of slaves they wanted to sell online. Sympathetic slaveholders – or those looking to make a quick profit – could sometimes be persuaded to sell them back to families, who would beg and borrow to raise the money.

Rescue office chief Bozani said the office has reimbursed around $6 million of these expenses, but it can take time to raise the funds. The Talals have not received anything yet for Rojin’s rescue, they said.

The number of rescues dropped sharply as IS began losing territory and was driven underground.

At least 204 Yazidis were freed in 2019, when the IS “caliphate” collapsed in Syria, but just 57 have returned to Iraq in the years since, according to figures compiled by the rescue office. The figures may not include some freed captives who chose to remain in Syria, returned to Iraq on their own or moved to third countries, the office said.

Some Yazidis were mixed in with IS fighters and family members who fled to Idlib or slipped over the border into Turkey, Bozani said. But the majority of those found since 2020 were being held in al-Hol, the detention camp for IS families where Rojin said he was taken.

Dalf, from Yazidi House, said former captives told him there were dozens more Yazidis being held there by IS families. Camp officials told Reuters that they try to find Yazidis hidden among some 40,000 detainees in the sprawling tent city but are hampered by IS loyalists who have carried out dozens of killings there.

“Every once in a while, we get information that a Yazidi woman is in a tent, but when they realize that we know, they hide them,” said Jihan Hanan, the camp’s director, who is also convinced there are more Yazidis there.

The State Department said coalition forces were working with the SDF to disrupt IS networks that threaten camp residents but noted that attempts to identify Yazidis were “sensitive operations” that could “endanger the very people we seek to protect.”

Yazidi captives are often too afraid to seek help, four survivors told Reuters.

Rafida Naif, a 26-year-old Yazidi woman, spent 20 months at al-Hol. She said she feared she would be killed if she identified herself to guards and wasn’t immediately removed from the IS family she was with. When the family would hear a vehicle approaching their tent, she said, they would hide her in a hole and cover it with cardboard or bedding.

By a stroke of luck, she said, she was swept up with other residents for questioning after a fight broke out. Alone with camp officials, she revealed her story.

After her release, she said, she left her toddler, fathered by an Iraqi militant, at a nearby orphanage.

“I’ve had no contact with him since I came back,” Naif said of the boy. She was speaking by phone from a camp for displaced people in Kurdistan, where she still lives four years later. “He is from their blood, not mine, and it happened through rape.”

The orphanage said it is caring for about 20 children surrendered under similar circumstances. But some women prefer to remain in al-Hol than give them up, Naif and activists said. Others take their children abroad, joining an estimated 120,000 Yazidis who have left Iraq since 2014.

It can also be hard to persuade kidnapped boys to come home, rescuers said.

The militants “give boys a motorbike, weapons, a car,” said Shrem, the beekeeper, who has resumed farming in Sinjar but still helps organize rescues. “They create an atmosphere that is attractive for adolescents.”

It has been over a year since a former child soldier Shrem helped free in 2018, Adnan Zandenan, received a Facebook message from a younger brother he presumed was dead.

“My hands were trembling. I thought one of my friends was messing with me,” Zandenan, now 21, recalled as he smoked a water pipe in his garden in Sinjar’s Wardiya village.

But his elation quickly turned to despair when the 18-year-old refused to leave Idlib, where he now lives.

Shrem said he assured the teen he would be welcomed with open arms and would find money, a car and a wife. Every few days, Zandenan sends his brother another message, but he is losing hope of persuading him.

“He thinks Daesh are his family. He doesn’t know that his family are here,” Zandenan said.

Reuters is not identifying the brother for his safety.

WAY FORWARD

Tens of thousands of displaced Yazidis still live in shabby tent camps in Kurdistan. Some are taking advantage of cash aid offered by the Iraqi government to help them move back to Sinjar, but others say the aid is not sufficient.

Much of the district remains largely destroyed. Security is also a problem: Ethnic and religious militias that helped drive IS out of Sinjar have refused to demobilize, and Turkey carries out drone strikes against some of them.

Employment options are few, especially for those whose education was disrupted by the war.

Zandenan works as a day laborer, helping Yazidis rebuild shattered homes.

Naif got married in September and plans to remain for now in Kurdistan, where her husband runs a cell phone store.

For the Talal brothers, Aydin and Rojin, it has been harder to see a way forward.

Aydin wanted to go back to school but was put off when told he would be in a class with 9- and 10-year-olds. He is living off aid and learning to play the buzuq, a long-necked lute.

Rojin is still adjusting to life as a Yazidi. He is more comfortable speaking Arabic than his native Kurdish and punctuates his sentences with Islamic expressions.

He too dreams of studying and traveling abroad. But his main wish, he said, is to be a “normal person” with a calm life.

His brother worries about how quiet he has become – not like the happy, chatty child he remembers.

Saeed said he often finds his nephews whispering about their time with IS, only to fall silent when he approaches.

He too was captured in the attack on their village but managed to escape when IS guards weren’t looking. He sent his wife and four children to Germany for safety and stayed behind to look for missing relatives.

Rojin is one of 10 family members he helped rescue. Thirteen others are still missing.

He suspects some are buried in mass graves and is frustrated about how long it is taking Iraqi authorities to excavate them. But he says he won’t stop looking for them.

“If I don’t do it, who will?” Saeed asked.