For Yazidi survivors of ISIS killings, the nightmares go on
SINJAR (Iraq): Ever since Islamic State visited death and destruction on their villages in northern Iraq nearly five years ago, Yazidis Daoud Ibrahim and Kocher Hassan have had trouble sleeping.
For Hassan, 39, who was captured, it is her three missing children, and three years of imprisonment at the hands of the jihadist group.
For Ibrahim, 42, who escaped, it is the mass grave that he returned to find on his ravaged land.
"They burnt one house down, blew up the other, they torched the olive trees two three times...There is nothing left," the father of eight told Reuters.
More than 3,000 other members of their minority sect were killed in 2014 in an onslaught that the United Nations described as genocidal.
Ibrahim and Hassan lived to tell of their suffering, but like other survivors, they have not moved on.
She will never set foot in her village of Rambousi again. "My sons built that house. I can't go back without them...Their school books are still there, their clothes," she said.
As U.S. President Donald Trump prepares to announce the demise of the Islamist group in Syria and Iraq, U.N. data suggests many of those it displaced in the latter country have, like Hassan, not returned home.
Meanwhile, Ibrahim and his family live in a barn next to the pile of rubble that was once their home. He grows wheat because the olive trees will need years to grow again. No one is helping him rebuild, so he is doing it himself, brick by brick.
"Life is bad. There is no aid," he said sitting on the edge of the collapsed roof which he frequently rummages under to find lost belongings. On this day, it was scarves, baby clothes and a photo album.
"Every day that I see this mass grave I get ten more grey hairs," he said.
The grave, discovered in 2015 just outside nearby Sinjar city, contains the remains of more than 70 elderly women from the village of Kocho, residents say. "I hear the cries of their spirits at the end of the night. They want to be buried, but the government won't remove their remains." They and their kin also want justice, Ibrahim adds.
