It was one in the morning on a spring night in 2019 when Sanaa Alneamat saw a photo of her missing sister online. She was wearing a headscarf – unlike when the Yazidi teenager was last seen as she was abducted by militants from the so-called Islamic State – and she was older, but Alneamat immediately recognised a birthmark on her sister’s face, and her eyes.
Staring at the picture, which had been posted on social media, Alneamat had no doubt: This was the same sister she had last laid eyes on five years earlier, when they were both captured from the small village of Kocho, located in the historic Yazidi homeland of Sinjar, northwestern Iraq.
That August – 10 years ago this week – IS ripped through Sinjar, systematically killing more than 5,000 people, and abducting over 6,400 more, in a campaign the UN has called a genocide. At the time, Alneamat was 21, and her sister 16.
“I just screamed,” recounted Alneamat, now 31, on seeing the photo. “I couldn’t speak anymore… I didn't believe [this meant] she might come back,” she told The New Humanitarian from the city in west Germany where she lives today.
After years in captivity, Alneamat’s sister had been identified among a group of Syrian refugees and taken to a house for rescued Yazidis in northeastern Syria. The organisation that rescued her had posted on Facebook that she was safe and was asking: “Did anyone know her?”
It was a hopeful moment, but also a reminder that while Alneamat was geographically far from the brutal crimes that tore apart her family, her village, and the entire Yazidi community in Iraq, the aftermath is still very much part of daily life for her and many survivors.
A decade after the start of the genocide, people like Alneamat are still trying to pick up the pieces of lives shattered, and to find those who are still missing.
Putting a family back together
Since she escaped IS captivity after four months in 2014, Alneamat – who is a founding member of the Farida Global Organisation, a nonprofit set up by Yazidi survivors in Germany that aims to support survivors and advocates for the return of the missing – has been trying to put her own family back together.
One by one, she and her three sisters escaped captivity. All but one have built lives for themselves in Germany.
Only the last sister to escape, the one with the birthmark on her cheek, is still in an Iraqi camp. Since she was found and her picture posted online, they have been able to speak through video calls but have still not seen each other in person.
And the search isn’t over: Alneamat has not seen her parents or two brothers since that horrific August in 2014. She believes her father and older brother were killed immediately but isn’t sure what happened to her mother and younger brother. These missing relatives are among more than 2,600 Yazidis who remain unaccounted for today.
In addition to the capture, sexual slavery, torture, and killings carried out by IS, the genocide forced some 400,000 Yazidis into displacement. Many live in camps near Sinjar and across northern Iraq, but others sought safety elsewhere, fleeing the country if possible.
Alneamat is among them, joining 1,100 Yazidi women and children who were brought to Germany in 2015 as part of a special humanitarian admissions programme established by the state of Baden-Württemberg.
With tens of thousands of Yazidis arriving over the last decade, Germany now hosts the largest Yazidi diaspora in the world. Numbering more than 200,000, the community is made up not only of this latest migration, but of Yazidis fleeing past persecution in Türkiye, Syria, Armenia, and Georgia. Over generations, Yazidi lore tells of 74 genocides.
Growing up, this was distant history for Alneamat.
“When our parents or the Yazidi community talked about genocide… I never really considered what it is like. I never thought I would come back home one day, and my family wouldn’t be there,” she said. “Now, we live with missing people every day.”
Searching for the missing
Alneamat’s days are busy. She’s training as an office administrator, and has worked as a translator. In her work at the Farida Global Organisation, she tries to push German and international authorities to identify and return the missing, both dead and alive.
“It’s on our shoulders,” said Alneamat. “Those in captivity don’t have any rights, they don’t have a voice. So that’s one of the most important tasks of survivors – to call for the return of the missing.”
For years, efforts have been ongoing to identify remains in mass graves in Iraq. In some cases, this work has been hampered by the fact that many Yazidis aren’t able to travel to Iraq to provide DNA samples to match with relatives.
The devastation of the genocide means not all of the missing have family members left.
That changed last year, when a pilot project began collecting reference samples from the Yazidi diaspora in Stuttgart. The pilot was carried out by the intergovernmental International Commission on Missing Persons (ICMP) for Iraq’s Ministry of Health and the Martyrs’ Foundation, a government body set up to compensate the families of the missing and dead from various wars.
Alexander Hug, head of ICMP’s Iraq programme, told The New Humanitarian by video call that involving survivors outside the country is critical to identifying remains from the atrocities committed by IS.
To allow the best chance of identifying a missing person using DNA, blood or saliva samples are collected from relatives of missing persons and profiled, Hug explained. The closer the relationship, and the more relatives available to donate, the better. ICMP recommends at least three donors per missing person.
But the devastation of the genocide means not all of the missing have family members left.
“There are many families who don't have anyone, who are all missing, maybe killed or their only relatives are very far away,” Alneamat said.
A huge caseload
Iraq’s huge number of missing persons – with tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of victims stretching from Saddam Hussein’s rule to the more recent crimes of IS – mean the process of identification is highly complex and goes far beyond just collecting DNA samples.
“It's a vast amount of data, with lots of different agencies involved,” said Hug, who has been working to support the centralisation of processes in Iraq, not just for the identification of Yazidis but for the remains of all those missing in the country.
The work is ongoing, but some activists fear that the impending closure of the UN mission to investigate the crimes of IS in Iraq, UNITAD, will further slow things down.
The mission, which will end in September after its relationship with the Iraqi government soured, is one of the main organisations supporting and funding exhumations of all IS victims, not just Yazidis. It is currently working with Iraqi authorities to exhume the mass grave known as Alu Antar, in western Nineveh province, which is believed to hold the remains of 600 to 700 victims.
“The challenges for the Iraqi teams working on exhumations are going to double,” said Ismail Qasim, who works with the northern Iraq-based Yazda, one of the largest NGOs supporting survivors in Iraq. Yazda has long pushed for the exhumation of Alu Antar.
Although 61 mass graves and 68 individual killing sites have been exhumed in Sinjar, resulting in the remains of 696 people, Qasim said that according to Iraq’s Mass Graves Directorate, only 243 have been identified and returned to their families.
There are still 33 graves in Sinjar alone that have not been opened, not to mention others in Syria, said Qasim.
For Alneamat, certainty for her own family and so many others is vital: “It’s very bad if I would see the bones of my family, but at least it’s a result for me… I hope that [the missing] are found, that the dead are respected, that they are buried in Yazidi tradition, and that the family has a cemetery where they can visit the dead.”
The challenge of time
Last year, Alneamat thought she might be heading towards some answers about her younger brother, who was just 10 years old when he was captured and taken to Syria in 2014.
A friend who had been with the brother years after his abduction told Alneamat that he had been seen close to the site of an explosion in Syria. The friend didn’t know if he had survived. Either way, Alneamat finally had a location where her brother had been seen, and someone willing to take authorities there. It was the best lead she’d had in years.
But although she shared this lead with various Iraqi and international authorities, nothing else happened.
Unlike for the dead – which government and international organisations are actively seeking to identify – there is no coordinated, state-led effort to rescue the living, or those whose fate is unknown.
“No one is officially supporting the Yazidis at the federal [Iraqi government] level to find and liberate the missing,” said Yazda’s Qasim.
Most of the approximately 4,000 Yazidis who have returned from captivity were rescued through private actors, with families often paying thousands of dollars in fees.
“There are Yazidis who don't know their real names anymore because the Islamic State changed a lot of names… and if these children don't know their names anymore, or where they come from… that is, of course, very, very challenging.”
Qasim said it is especially hard to find Yazidis who were kidnapped as boys. These children were forced into IS training camps and brainwashed to fight for the group.
“Every year that passes, every day that passes, it becomes more and more difficult to find these people,” said 24-year-old Ardawan Abdi, who himself spent 7 months in IS captivity at the age of 14. He spoke to The New Humanitarian by video call from his home in Freiburg, where he has lived since 2015. Having witnessed what he described as “psychologically unbearable” horrors at a young age, Abdi now works to support his community on issues of survivors’ rights and migration.
In prison camps in Syria, like the infamous Al-Hol, which houses some 56,000 people with real or perceived links to IS, Abdi said Yazidis who were abducted as children have gotten lost.
“There are [Yazidis] who don't know their real names anymore because the Islamic State changed a lot of names… and if these children don't know their names anymore, or where they come from… that is, of course, very, very challenging.”
There are other hurdles to overcome: Alneamat is worried about her mother, who couldn’t read or write and spoke no Arabic when she was abducted.
Survivors like Alneamat are calling for greater efforts to locate the missing, and not just from Iraq. Many are leaning on Germany, which has been supportive of Yazidis in the past, to use its diplomatic weight on this issue.
“If Germany recognises the genocide against Yazidis, why is there no diplomatic solution to search for these people internationally?” asked Abdi, who recently became a German citizen.
Max Lucks, member of parliament with Alliance 90/The Greens, Germany’s green political party, and chairman of the Parliamentary Committee on Human Rights and Humanitarian Aid, told The New Humanitarian that the Federal Foreign Office actively searches when there are concrete cases of missing Yazidis, but success has been limited.
“The problem is that in some areas where people are presumed to be missing, for example in Al-Hol camp, we have no direct contact with the Kurdish forces managing [the camp], which is why support for searches is being provided in a roundabout way,” he said. “In all the individual cases that I have witnessed, my feeling has been that the channels and opportunities that are available are being used very actively, and occasionally they are successful, [but] unfortunately not always.”
No psychological end
The lack of certainty can extend the nature of an already horrific trauma, said Dr Jan Kizilhan, a psychologist and trauma expert who has been working with Yazidi survivors for decades.
“Even if the trauma was 10 years ago, they're still living this trauma today, and probably also tomorrow,” Kizilhan said, speaking by phone from Stuttgart where he directs the Institute for Transcultural Health Science at Baden-Württemberg Cooperative State University.
In 2015, he headed the German mission to identify survivors for the Baden-Württemberg programme, interviewing 1,400 women and children and recommending those most likely to benefit from the state’s scheme, which offered medical and psychological treatment as well as residence in Germany. In 2016, he co-founded the Institute for Psychotherapy and Psychotraumatology at the University of Dohuk in northern Iraq, to build local expertise in a field with gaping needs in the country.
He said the ongoing issue of missing people exacerbates and perpetuates the trauma the community already suffers.
For Alneamat’s part, she sees no choice but to remain strong. “Family is everything. If I don't [search], maybe 10 years will go by, maybe 30 years will go by… Although you don't get quick answers, I still work, nevertheless.”
But she is afraid of what could happen – or could not happen – as time runs on.
“My fear is often that I won’t find or see anything of my family until I am very old,” she said. “I have this big fear that I won’t be able to give any information anymore because it will be too late.”
Edited by Annie Slemrod.
