The Yazidi shopkeepers in Snuny, in northern Iraq, have a warmth about them that belies their circumstances. A year ago their town was liberated from ISIS by Kurdish peshmerga forces. The hope was that some of the 250,000 Yazidis who fled ISIS after the extremist group began massacring them and selling women into slavery would return to these tranquil plains. But the men, and it’s mostly men who have come back to tend their shops, say life here is impossible. “It’s very difficult to speak of the future. We were surrounded by Arabs, we are afraid of them returning,” says forty-year-old Hussein. “This is still a military zone, there is no electricity, we have nothing.”
In August of last year ISIS swept across northern Iraq, conquering thousands of square kilometers, an area approximate in size to the state of Connecticut. The extremist group had already taken over many of Iraq’s large Sunni cities, such as Mosul, Tikrit and Falluja between January and June 2014.
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