under the mount sinjar

Sinjar is a town in the Sinjar District of the Nineveh Governorate in northern Iraq,  located about five kilometres south of the Sinjar Mountains. 

In August 2014, ISIS took over large territories of Nineveh province. Following the withdrawal of the Kurdish Peshmerga, they seized the city of Sinjar on August 3. During the following days, IS militants perpetrated the Sinjar massacre, killing 2,000 Yazidi men and taking Yazidi women into slavery, leading to a mass exodus of Yazidi residents. According to a United Nations report, 5,000 Yazidi civilians were killed during the ISIS August offensive.

On November 13, 2015, Kurdish forces and Yazidi militias backed by US airstrikes entered the city and fully regained its control from ISIS.

This photography set is from June 2016. Most of the Yazidis, who saved their lives by escaping to the mountain, were still afraid to come down of it.