ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - A fire broke out at a camp housing Yazidi internally displaced persons (IDPs) in the Kurdistan Region's northern Duhok province on Tuesday, a camp administrator told Rudaw, adding that the damage was mainly material with no casualties recorded.
"A fire broke out at the Sheikhan camp around 2:00 pm [local time]," Qado Khalaf told Rudaw's Naif Ramazan, noting that the facility mainly hosts IDPs from the Yazidi heartland of Shingal (Sinjar) in northern Iraq.
“The damages were strictly material, affecting tents," Khalad added, noting that no one was harmed.
Barakat Abdi, one of the IDPs at Sheikhan camp, told Rudaw that he and seven other family members barely escaped the flames.
"We ran out of the tent, but there were four barrels of kerosene outside which had caught fire, and it spread rapidly - the fire came to our tent and burned everything," he said.
The Islamic State (ISIS) in June 2014 seized large parts of northern and western Iraq. By August, the group launched a brutal campaign against the Yazidi community in Shingal, killing an estimated 5,000 to 10,000 Yazidi men and older women, and abducting 6,000 to 7,000 women and girls for sexual slavery and human trafficking.
The United Nations officially recognized the campaign against the Yazidis as a genocide.
During the ISIS attack on Shingal, around 400,000 Yazidis were forced to flee, with most seeking refuge in the Kurdistan Region, including the Sheikhan camp which was set up in 2015.
Although Iraq declared full liberation from ISIS in 2017, thousands of Yazidi families remain displaced, mainly in camps in Duhok, with their return chiefly hindered by ongoing security concerns and the presence of various armed groups in Shingal.
The Directorate of Migration and Crisis Response (DMCR) in Duhok - which operates under the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) - reported in October that some 15 camps for Shingal IDPs in Duhok are housing nearly 100,000 individuals.
Fires in IDP camps are not a singular occurrence, especially in the scorching summer heat.
In July 2025, five caravans in the Mamrashan camp in Duhok were destroyed by fire, in addition to four tents in the Chamishku camp and seven tents in the Khanke camp.
Primary causes of fire include electrical faults and overloads, the storage and use of kerosene heaters and fuel drums, and the vulnerability of the highly flammable shelters to fire - though no fatalities have been recorded in the Kurdistan Region's camps.
A fire broke out at a camp housing Yazidi internally displaced persons (IDPs) in the Kurdistan Region's northern Duhok province on Tuesday, a camp administrator told Rudaw, adding that the damage was mainly material with no casualties recorded.
— Rudaw English (@RudawEnglish) July 21, 2026
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