SHINGAL - Eight years after liberation from the Islamic State (ISIS), local authorities have started removing mounds of rubble from the site of destroyed houses that saw significant damage during the battle for Shingal in November 2015.
On August 3, 2014, ISIS militants took over the district of Shingal, committing genocide against the Yazidi minority.
Thousands fled their homes as the militants systematically killed men and older women, and enslaved younger women and children.
"We have so far worked in too many different parts of Shingal including the city center. We will clear all the neighborhoods of debris...", Maysem Rasul, an engineer supervising the debris removal process, told Rudaw’s Naif Ramadhan on Saturday.
The Kurdish Yazidi town of Shingal still remains largely desolate.
Only a handful of its population has returned due to a lack of basic services.
The Shingal reconstruction process to make way for building new houses has been underway for the past three months.
The Nineveh province municipal teams have so far cleared 200 houses and state institutions of debris.
"All the rubble that is close to intact houses is a danger to people especially children due to the existence of insects and snakes and scorpions," Zaynal Ismael, resident of Shingal, said.
Of more than 600,000 square kilometers of land that needs to be cleaned of war debris in Shingal, 200,000 has so far been cleaned.
There are still many people who lead a difficult life among the piles of rubble in the war-torn Yazidi heartland.
ISIS seized control of large swaths of land in Iraq and Syria in 2014. The group committed genocide against Yazidis when they swept through the religious minority’s heartland of Shingal, killing around 5,000 Yazidi men, some of whom were put into mass graves. Around 7,000 women and girls, some as young as nine, were enslaved.
The fate of over 2,500 Yazidis who were kidnapped by ISIS remains unknown, according to data from Rescue Kidnapped Yazidis office established by Kurdistan Region President Nechirvan Barzani.
