Americans may be surprised to hear it: Thousands of Yazidis still live, stranded, on Mount Sinjar, a barren desert waste rising 4,800 feet in elevation in northwestern Iraq. Two years ago the world watched in horror as Iraqi Yazidis and Christians fled up the mountain to escape ISIS, only to become trapped.

As hundreds of children and elderly began to perish atop the craggy summit from thirst and exposure in the brutal summer heat, U.S. President Barack Obama launched airstrikes against ISIS and announced a military-led humanitarian operation “to help save Iraqi civilians stranded on the mountain.”

Obama on Aug. 7, 2014, made a televised evening statement from the White House State Dining Room to call attention to “chilling reports” of ISIS militants “rounding up families, conducting mass executions, and enslaving Yazidi women.” Over the next days an American C-17 and two C-130s, along with Iraqi army helicopters, airdropped supplies—food, water, diapers—enough to help 8,000 of the 50,000 stranded Iraqis.

President Obama warned of “the systematic destruction of the entire Yazidi people, which would constitute genocide.” He concluded, “These innocent families are faced with a horrible choice: Descend the mountain and be slaughtered, or stay and slowly die of thirst and hunger.”

By that time militants already had raised the black flag of ISIS, or Islamic State, over government buildings at the base of the mountain in the city of Sinjar, overtaking the ancient city on the fringes of Nineveh Plain and driving out nearly all its 88,000 residents. “We heard they killed the young men with swords and exploded old people with bombs,” nearby resident Samah Anwar, a Yazidi who survived the attacks, told me soon after. Girls had been taken captive, she said, sold “by cheapest price, about $5, $10.”

With the help of U.S. airstrikes and Kurdish military offensives, a corridor for trapped Yazidis opened in 2014. Many fled to Turkey then made their way back to Iraqi Kurdistan, where most are living, two years later, in tent camps and other makeshift housing.

In recent weeks the Iraqi army has battled Islamic State militants, retaking the city of Fallujah and smaller towns of Anbar province south of the Yazidi homeland. Working alongside Popular Mobilization Units with intermittent air support from a U.S.-led coalition, Iraq’s military is poised for a major offensive against the ISIS stronghold in Mosul, the country’s second-largest city, and surrounding Nineveh Plain. But two years after the ISIS invasions split the country in half, the humanitarian situation for the country’s Yazidis and others stands little changed.

The estimated 10,000 people living in tents atop Mount Sinjar have watched Kurdish forces since late 2015 free the city of Sinjar and other areas below, but the Kurds failed to widen their zone of control against ISIS. That has left outlying Yazidi villages under dominion of the radical Islamist group, and Sinjar itself remains vulnerable to weekly rounds of mortar and missile fire from ISIS positions.

Earlier this year, in February, ISIS used chemical weapons in two attacks on Sinjar, releasing noxious gases that sickened more than 280 Kurdish soldiers and residents. So only about 100 residents are actually living in the city—once a city of Yazidis, Kurds, Christians, and others now reduced to anyone with stomach enough to persevere.

North of the city and Mount Sinjar are another estimated 30,000 to 50,000 displaced, hanging on, living in tents and on open ground, without electricity or running water, their plight essentially unchanged since President Obama highlighted it to buttress his decision to recommit U.S. military personnel to Iraq after a decade-plus war.

Despite territorial gains against ISIS, the retrograde displacement and persistent suffering of the jihadis’ victims remain largely, strangely unaddressed. Aid workers say they are forced to carry out crude assessments to determine ongoing need and numbers displaced, absent any coordinated response. Humanitarian aid convoys deliver supplies also at their own risk, skirting ISIS front lines and Kurdish blockades, and in some cases having to dodge airstrikes from the U.S.-led coalition.

Kurdish forces fear opening the territory they’ve fought ISIS for: They won’t quickly cede control to Baghdad or its Iranian-backed protection units, who might use routes through the area to supply Syrian fighters just across the border west of Sinjar. The Kurdish peshmerga have embargoed Sinjar and nearby areas from needed deliveries, blocking rebuilding projects.

The State Department only this year declared ISIS actions against the Yazidis (along with Iraq’s Christian population and Shiite Muslims) to be genocide. On the ground in Sinjar—considered the heartland of the world’s only indigenous Yazidi population—there’s no evidence Washington or other entities are stepping in to protect the displaced population or redress the mass expulsion and violence endured by the ancient people group, who trace their religion to Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and Islam.

EARLY ON in the ISIS invasion of Iraq, the militants targeted Yazidis for killing and enslavement, considering them pagans not on par with also-targeted Christians and Shiites. More than 400,000 Yazidis—from a total population of about 650,000—have been displaced. Tens of thousands are presumed killed or captured.

Yazda, a Yazidi organization, has documented 35 confirmed or likely mass grave sites in Yazidi areas overrun by Islamic State, places where ISIS massacred dozens and in some cases more than 500 people, mostly men. At one location, a local resident came upon a massacre site before the bodies had been buried and recognized 71 as relatives or neighbors. From the city of Sinjar alone, at least 5,000 residents are officially categorized as missing.

ISIS captured in 2014 thousands of women and girls. Current estimates (based on communication, accounts from rescued women and girls, and missing persons reports) yield a grim toll: About 3,400 Yazidi girls remain in ISIS captivity.

“One of the most salient points to remember regarding genocide is that it is not a numbers game,” said Abigail Berg, director of government relations for the 21st Century Wilberforce Initiative, following her visit to northern Iraq. “It is the ‘intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.’”

Berg said her organization, which visited Iraq last December, found Sinjar entirely decimated: “Every Yazidi house has been systematically bombed. There is nothing to which the Yazidi people could return. No family history, no photographs, and no buildings of cultural or historical significance have been preserved. ISIS has destroyed proof of existence of entire generations.”

Other aid workers who have managed to enter Sinjar since that time give similarly dire accounts. Joel Dokkestul, who’s been working more than a year among displaced Yazidis, entered the city in the spring, encountering first a forbidding line of blast walls erected by Kurdish peshmerga. Inside he discovered “Sinjar is literally empty, a city completely destroyed. I did not see one single building that was intact.”

Houses are rubble, with clothing and other belongings strewn in the streets, said Dokkestul. ISIS fighters downed power lines and exploded street-side shops. Nowhere did he see a window with glass left in it.

“The utter devastation of what ISIS brought is shocking,” he said.

ISIS fighters wired the city’s hospital with improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, and much of the facility remains a no-go area. Snipers operated out of the operating rooms, residents told Dokkestul, while militants divided hospital personnel and patients into two groups, taking one group as slaves and, presumably, killing the other. Children’s shoes on examination room floors testify to young patients one minute waiting to be seen by a doctor, and the next simply disappeared. Two blocks away, said Dokkestul, a mass grave contains an estimated 80 bodies.

In the city center Dokkestul watched as Kurdish soldiers replaced a cross ISIS had torn down from the destroyed St. Mary Armenian Church. Sinjar had thousands of Christian residents, and they too have fled—to camps in northern Iraq, to Turkey, Jordan, or the West. Some displaced Christian families are living alongside Yazidis north of Mount Sinjar and in other camps.

“The Yazidis feel betrayed on all sides. They don’t trust anyone,” said Dokkestul. “But they trust Christians like brothers. This is an opportunity for Christians. They will say to me, ‘You are the ones who are standing with us.’”

IRAQ’S YAZIDIS have long lived in cloistered communities, shunning marriage to outsiders and preferring the remote reaches of Nineveh Plain to cities. Yazidi temples dot the Nineveh landscape, often competing with crosses for skyline across hilly villages. Some Yazidis resided in larger cities, like Mosul and Tel Afar (both now under ISIS control), but where Yazidis have coexisted, it’s usually been alongside ancient Christian communities.

In August 2007 four coordinated bomb attacks hit a cluster of Yazidi towns, including Sinjar. The bombings killed 500 mostly Yazidi residents—the largest number of casualties from a terror incident since 9/11—yet they drew little attention in the American or Arab press, due to the community’s isolation and prevailing prejudices.

The coming of ISIS in 2014 forced Yazidi families to relocate, usually alongside Christians rather than Muslims. Christian clergy in the North have made church housing available to Yazidis. The Nashville-based Servant Group International opened a school to serve displaced Yazidi children near Khanke, outside the city of Dohuk (see “In the shadow of ISIS,” Aug. 22, 2015). With Sinjar’s liberation from ISIS in late 2015, other faith-based aid groups are helping Yazidis and assisting with rebuilding in the Sinjar area.

Plain Compassion Crisis Response is a Pennsylvania Amish and Mennonite organization working in Sinjar to refurbish destroyed buildings—replacing windows and replastering walls where possible—and provide new housing for Yazidis. Along with volunteer construction crews, the group also has brought in medical teams.

Free Burma Rangers (FBR) is another seemingly unlikely nongovernmental organization that’s stepped in to serve Yazidis. The group has worked alongside persecuted Christians in Burma, or Myanmar, for two decades, and those Burmese Christians joined the group’s teams to deliver aid in Iraq.

David Eubank, FBR founder, served in the U.S. military during Operation Desert Storm in the Gulf War. For six weeks in 2014 his team delivered clothing and other supplies to Iraqis stranded on Mount Sinjar. His teams have returned with aid ever since, and Eubank was among those sickened by chemical weapons in February: “For about a month we were nauseous, dizzy, and had headaches,” he said.

FBR has held dental and medical clinics in the Sinjar area and outdoor clubs for displaced Yazidi children. The group hopes to build a playground in the city. Sinjar is “in ruins,” Eubank told me, “and ISIS just isn’t that far away. Most people have decided they are not ready to come back. The front line is too close.”

Eubank also said people are leaving all the time, for other, safer cities in Iraq and for Europe. “People have lost heart. They say no one wants them to go home.”

AS MILITARY ACTION BEGINS to dislodge ISIS, humanitarian workers like Eubank and others see the potential for another looming crisis. Some factions in Iraq regard those who’ve survived living under ISIS for two years, or who stayed close to their homes in hopes of returning, as potentially complicit in ISIS atrocities. Returning residents safely to so much ruin and rubble will require a large-scale, coordinated humanitarian effort. Yet for now, besides these small Christian NGOs, the Yazidi nonprofit Yazda, and relief deliveries from the Kurdish Barzani Charity Foundation, no such aid effort is in place to protect and sustain Yazidi survivors in their Sinjar homeland.

No one, either, seems ready to draw up a plan. Instead, authorities are leaving intrepid groups to figure a way through the security hurdles and logistics challenges themselves.

As Eubank and others warn, that haphazard approach will leave Iraq’s Yazidis—and others who have thus far survived the ISIS onslaught—facing another crisis of survival in the months ahead.

Please read Joel Dokkestul’s poem below about the Yazidis’ plight, “War in the Garden.”

ISIS cruelty

“Eighteen members of my family have been killed, or are missing” is the stark assessment of Nadia Murad, the 23-year-old Yazidi who survived months of ISIS captivity in Mosul before she escaped in November 2014. Those killed include her mother and six brothers. “I consider everyone who has suffered or been killed by Daesh [ISIS in Arabic] to be my family,” she told the BBC.

Murad could be described as the poster victim of ISIS cruelty to Yazidi and some Christian women. Held in her village high school while forced to watch ISIS militants gun down scores of men, she was transported to Mosul and sold to an ISIS fighter who, along with other militants, raped and beat her repeatedly, at one point causing her to lose consciousness. “I did not want to kill myself—but I wanted them to kill me,” she later said.

Once she escaped, Murad made her way to Germany and has recounted ISIS atrocities with a steady anguish before UN panels and on June 22 before the U.S. Senate Homeland Security Committee. “No place is safe for anyone,” she said, just 10 days after a gunman pledging allegiance to ISIS gunned down 49 people in an Orlando nightclub. “Orlando will be repeated if the world doesn’t put an end [to] such terrorism. There is no sanctuary,” she told lawmakers.

In June the UN Human Rights Council issued a long-awaited report documenting ISIS atrocities against Yazidis, many centered on the Sinjar area. “ISIS has sought to destroy the Yazidis through killings [and through] sexual slavery, enslavement, torture and inhuman and degrading treatment and forcible transfer,” the report concludes.

The council recommended the UN Security Council “as a matter of urgency” refer the situation to the International Criminal Court (ICC). At the same time, noted human rights attorney Amal Clooney (and wife of U.S. actor George Clooney) announced she would represent Murad and other victims of Yazidi genocide in seeking ICC investigation and prosecution. —M.B.

War in the Garden

By Joel Dokkestul

I rushed among the flower blight, Where rusting-fields held silent dreams; And echoes tell their ravished fright, The rag and bone of voiceless strings, Destined dreamers.

The Seventy Fourth day was scarred, When meadows fumed from green to gull, Where spurs and spines were tarred and charred, Rived by the Viler, roused to cull.

I gazed the Garden fleshed in War, And saw an emblem left unnamed, That blurs the bloom once sweetly bore, With words of “I bear witness” framed.

The madmen in black shawls uphold, Those emblemed gates shut from the freed; I crawled back to the Garden Old, Where the last fragrant flowers breathed.

Alone, the foot-stone’s flowed spectre, Dwells on this silent sand-filled grave; With the last round of the rector, The veil of deadfall dressed the brave, Silenced sleepers.

3,400 Yazidi Girls. Still Enslaved.

Used with permission.