The ezidi community awaits return of their women & children, who are still missing. Forty seven kilometres from the beautiful city of Duhok, it is a picturesque drive to the foothills of Sinjar district. It is the northern region of Kurdistan guarded by Peshmerga, the military forces of the autonomous region of Kurdistan Iraq. In Kurdish, Peshmerga means ‘those who face death,’ and the word is heavy with historical importance. At dusk, an eerie silence mixed with a sense of foreboding prevails as the temperature plummets to four degrees. A few men are out on the road, near a municipality office, conversing with each other. Every day, the local municipality office in the foothills of Sinjar gets crowded as people wait for information on their loved ones.
A year after the fall of the Islamic State, the Ezidis in Kurdistan are still in the grip of fear. An uneasy stillness hangs in the air, as the road turns to the house of 27-year old Leyla Telo Khidher. Clad in blue jeans and a black t-shirt, Leyla is thin and pale. She doesn’t smile. Lines of sorrow run through her face. But her eyes are bright and fierce as those of the falcon. Determination to fight and win back life flow out, as Leyla begins narrating her miserable story of kidnap, rape and torture.
For two years and eight months, Leyla was enslaved by the ISIS fighters, sold eight times, raped, beaten and tortured. A year after getting back to her family, she is still waiting to hear if her husband Marwan is alive. Though she knows that chances are bleak, Leyla still expects him to return one day. Her seven-year-old son, who once used to draw only guns and say that those who don’t follow Islam should be killed, now goes to school, normalcy returning slowly to his life.
Born in a family of farmers and shepherds, Leyla, a mother of two fell prey in the hands of ISIS fighters, when the deadly Islamic State men, captured Mount Sinjar. As a child, Leyla who was living with her brothers and her sisters in Mount Sinjar and working on her family farm. After a spate of sheep theft, the family decided to move to Kojo, a village in the foothills of Mount Sinjar. In 2003, her brothers joined the Peshmerga forces after the US-led invasion of Iraq. Leyla and her brothers were happy and lived a peaceful life. Leyla was always happy as a child and even after her marriage, her life was peaceful.
But it all changed in 2014 when the ISIS came to attack Siba Shiekheder, the Ezidi town on the Syrian border. On August 2, 2014, some of Leyla’s family friends from Siba Sheikheder called on her brothers for. This was also the time when Peshmerga fled from Kojo. The family did not know was clueless and so with some of the other villagers, Leyla and her family decided to flee the place, as they thought ISIS might come to Kojo also. The other shocker came in when Leyla’s sister who was living in Siba Sheikheder called, on August 3, 2014, to say that ISIS was coming.” Leyla and her family decided to go towards the North of Sinjar, leaving back one of their old uncles at home.

Ezidi24.com