My family was just one of the tens of thousands who fled on August 3, 2014.
We lived in a village to the south of Sinjar mountain called Tel Ezer. I worked as a school teacher, a job I loved very much.
When ISIS (the Islamic State group) attacked, we fled to the mountain, taking just what we could carry. After agonizing days of heat and thirst we were able to escape over the border to Syria. We returned a week later as refugees in our own country. Since then my family and I have lived in a tent in Bajed Kandala camp for internally displaced persons (IDPs).
Now I work as the manager for a clinic run by a small NGO called Joint help for Kurdistan (JHK). It is hard work and long hours, but I don’t mind. Anything I can to help people is rewarding for me.
What makes me sad is to see our situation getting steadily worse. We Yazidis have been living in camps for seven years with nothing done to improve basic conditions. Families are still crammed into emergency tents designed to last a year at most. Organisations that used to provide some basic welfare services have left. Distribution of basic food and hygiene items has stopped. Promised rehabilitation programmes for survivors have not materialised. The best work most people can find, if they are lucky, is seasonal labour in the fields for 1,000 ($0.68) dinar an hour.
We all hoped that the terrible fire that consumed 400 tents in Sharya camp at the beginning of June would motivate the government to start improving safety and living conditions: simple steps like providing fire trucks so fires can be put out before they spread; allowing IDP families to build solid homes instead of tents. But we hoped in vain.
Every day our clinic’s doctor and nurses see around 200 patients. We give the best care we can, but since the government has stopped supplying medicines and foreign donors have not been able to raise money due to the pandemic, there is not much we can do to help. COVID-19 spreads rapidly in the cramped living conditions of the camps, but there are no facilities for testing or vaccination.
The worst health problems are not physical but mental. Yazidi people feel they have lost their future, and this leads to depression and other psychological problems. It takes strength to wait for seven years. Now they see the collapse of their dreams. Suicide has become more and more common, especially among young women. I personally have lost many of those close to me only in the past year. Last week a friend's sister took her own life. Yesterday I was told that a young girl from my village had killed herself. She was sixteen years old. I know all her family.
This is why I said that August 3 was only the beginning of the genocide of the Yazidis. The genocide has not stopped.
Thousands of families continue to search for missing women and girls. We know many of them are in ISIS camps in northern Syria and Mosul area, but there is no government plan to identify and bring them back. People make their own costly and dangerous arrangements.
When survivors do return, they do not get the help they need. Often survivors contact me to ask for help. There are so many. How can I choose who to help? That makes me very sad.
Every year on August 3 we have sought to draw attention to the continued suffering of Yazidi people, to ask for help from the people of Kurdistan and Iraq and the international community so that we can return home and rebuild. But the sad truth is that after all these years many Yazidis do not want to go home any more.
The Shingal area is a battle-ground for different militias. One never knows when conflicts will break out. Should we go home and sit and wait for 2014 to happen again?
The Yazidi future is a question mark. Nobody knows what will happen. Day after day more and more Yazidis look for any chance to leave Iraq and go to the west. Especially guys my age: they see no future in Iraq. If nothing has changed in seven years, why should anything be different in a few days or months? So they leave, using smugglers and illegal routes. It is very dangerous but still offers more hope of a normal life than rotting in a camp.
Next week is the seventh anniversary of the genocide. Every year we have organized a ceremony at the clinic. We have remembered the dead and we have called for justice for perpetrators, for return of the kidnapped, for international support to return and rebuild….
But this year we only dare to make the most humble of requests: a fire truck, permission to put a solid roof over our heads. I am afraid that even this is too much to ask.
Salih Hamo is field centre manager for Joint Help for Kurdistan, a volunteer-run NGO helping victims of disaster, war, persecution, and genocide in the Kurdistan Region.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of Rudaw.
