DUHOK, Kurdistan Region - Hundreds of Yezidi children have been orphaned or have lost all trace of their parents since they fled Islamic State fighters who swept into their homeland two months ago. Many families were split up as civilians sought the relative sanctuary of Mount Shingal when ISIS attacked the town of Shingal and its surroundings, the main centre of the Yezidis, a Kurdish minority that the jihadists consider to be infidels. Zeit Rachid, 18, is now is all alone in the world since losing sight of his mother, father, two brothers and a sister when he headed for the mountain in early August, part of an exodus that helped spur calls for international intervention to prevent a genocide. “They told me to run. We had to escape! In that catastrophe I lost them. I really don’t know how it happened,” said Zeit, who has now found refuge with distant relatives with whom he shares a room in an unfinished house in the Yezidi village of Sharya, outside the Kurdish city Duhok. On the mountaintop, where he was stranded with thousands of others for over a week, he searched fruitlessly for his family. A month ago he learned that they were still alive, but he has had no news since. “It would be the biggest present ever to have them back alive,” he said, “but I am somehow sure they are dead.” The escape from Shingal means Zeit has been unable to undergo scheduled treatment for kidney stones in his hometown. “All had been arranged in Shingal for me to have an operation,” he said. “Here they can only give me pain killers.” Some 25.000 Yezidi’s from the Shingal area have found refuge in Sharya, among them 28 children known to have been orphaned. As no official registration has been conducted, the numbers of internally displaced Yezidis throughout Iraqi Kurdistan can only be estimated, and is put at between a quarter and half a million. That puts the potential number of orphans in the hundreds. Gulestan, 19, and her sister Dalar, 11, found refuge with their uncle Samir in another skeleton of a house in Sharya. Just before the ISIS attack, her father had left to visit a village in which, she later heard, many men had been killed there by ISIS. She became separated from her mother on the way up to Mount Shingal. “Daash [ISIS] was shooting at us, and we had to run to save our lives. My mother could not. She sent us up and went back down herself,” she recounts with pain in her eyes. Uncle Samir adds: “She was too fat, weighing at least 150 kilos.” He thinks she was kidnapped, as the village she was heading for was later taken over by the jihadists. As she has not contacted the family in any way, Gulestan fears she may not have survived. In the cultural centre of Sharya, lawyer Jalal Lazgeen is in charge of the informal registration of the internally displaced living here. He goes through the written lists to find the orphans, a task that is hampered by the fact that in Iraq children who only lost their fathers are also considered to be orphans. “With some kids the parents are known to have died,” he said, consulting the list, “with others they are missing.” For some, contact has been made by the missing parent, but often nothing is known, leaving children between hope and fear for what has happened to their loved ones. Such is the case of Salam, a nine-year-old who looked after his two small sisters and brother when they fled to the mountain with his uncle Selou. The boy put the smallest one on his shoulders and held the others tightly by the hand. Salam’s mother had sent them to his uncle, because she was caring for their dying grandmother. An older sister and baby were with her, and they could not flee with the rest. “We spent seven days and nights on the mountain, and I could not find them,” Salam says sadly. Earlier, his father was picked up by ISIS in Mosul, he recounts quietly. He thinks his mother is there too. “They are with daash, with those bad people.” When his uncle tried to phone his mother, someone answered who had found the phone in the street. “I miss her terribly. I will do anything to see her again,” he says. ISIS has killed many men in the villages and towns of the Shingal region. Exact numbers are not known because most of the area is still under the militants’ control. An estimated 5,000 men, women and children have been kidnapped, and then distributed among various prisons, buildings and houses. Most of the orphans among the refugees are looked after by uncles, aunts and grandparents. Yezidi aid workers are developing a plan to offer special care for the most vulnerable children, who have lost all their family. They want to set up a special centre, where the kids will also be offered schooling.
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