They Fled ISIS A Decade Ago. Now, They’re Running For Their Lives Again.
HASSAKEH, Syria — Maryam Dahoud recalls how her hands couldn’t stop trembling during the journey from Aleppo, Syria, to Hassakeh — a five-hour car journey — this past January.
Every pothole, every sudden stop brought back images she couldn’t speak aloud: Cousins dragged away in 2014, friends who disappeared into ISIS slave markets and mothers separated from children who never came home.
She wasn't fleeing hypothetical danger. She was running from a distant memory of her and her family fleeing Iraq to Syria.
READ: Over 100 Families Face Eviction as Catholic Church Moves To Redevelop Land
When Islamic State terrorists swept through Sinjar in Iraq more than a decade ago in 2014, the terrorist organization killed 7,400 Yazidis in what the United Nations recognized as genocide.
Yazidis are a religious and ethnic minority whose faith combines elements of Islam, Christianity and a Zoroastrian-like reverence of fire as a manifestation of God.
“At the core of the Yazidis’ marginalization is their worship of a fallen angel, Melek Tawwus, or Peacock Angel, one of the seven angels that take primacy in their beliefs,” wrote Raya Jalabi, a reporter who covers the Middle East, in 2014. “Unlike the fall from grace of Satan, in the Judeo-Christian tradition, Melek Tawwus was forgiven and returned to heaven by God. The importance of Melek Tawwus to the Yazidis has given them an undeserved reputation for being devil-worshippers — a notoriety that, in the climate of extremism gripping Iraq, has turned life-threatening.”
In 2014, thousands of women and girls, including Maryam's cousins and friends, were enslaved, sold and subjected to systematic rape. An estimated 35,000 to 50,000 trapped Yazidis fled into Syria with the help of Kurdish forces to escape the genocide.
For Syria's Yazidis, who fled that massacre, that memory never recedes. It compounds with each new displacement, each new flight and each new set of armed men controlling the roads.
January’s fighting in Aleppo between Syria's transitional government and Syrian Democratic Forces forced another reckoning. When the Syrian Army assumed control of the Kurdish-majority Sheikh Maqsoud and Ashrafiyah neighborhoods, Yazidi families faced an impossible calculation: remain under new authorities whose intentions toward religious minorities were unknown, or flee again into uncertainty.
Most fled.
Dahoud’s husband works in construction when he can find the work, which isn't often. As she moved with her 7-year-old twin girls, holding bags of what remained of their lives, questions circled without answers. Would this conflict separate families again? Would anyone distinguish between civilians and combatants? Would anyone protect girls whose religion made them targets?
“Every commotion on the road brought back the same question,” Maryam, 37, said. “I feared they would become targets for the same fate that befell my cousins and friends and take our daughters from us”.
January’s clashes triggered a near-total exodus from neighborhoods that had become a refuge after previous displacements. Sheikh Maqsoud housed 1,200 Yazidi families before the escalation in January, according to the Yazidi House in Afrin.
Today, only 10 remain. The rest scattered to the Kobani villages, northeast Syria and Hassakeh, taking on economic hardship on top of unhealed psychological wounds.
This marks the community’s fourth major displacement in recent years, according to the Yazidi’s House, an umbrella organization representing the community. Before this, 22 villages in Afrin’s countryside in northern Syria were forcibly emptied, displacing 25,000 people. Each wave doesn't merely uproot families. It confirms what Yazidis have long feared: No corner of Syria can guarantee their safety.
Inheriting suffering
Hamid Jando, 27, has abandoned any thought of marriage. He said he will not pass inherited suffering to children; he will not risk raising daughters who might face what Yazidi girls endured under ISIS. He has fled four times since 2018: From Afrin to Deir Hafir, Deir Hafir to Hassakeh, back to Afrin and now Hassakeh again.
What haunts him isn’t only the physical movement but what it reveals about his community’s standing.
“The absence of guarantees, the lack of trust in armed factions, it makes us question our ability to protect ourselves and our rights as a religious minority in a country living through a fragile transition,” he said.
Jando is precise about what protections his community actually needs. Not general promises or loose slogans, he insisted, but concrete measures to prevent targeting based on religion, ensure justice and guarantee civilian safety during transitions of power.
“The Yazidi community, after everything it’s been through, only seeks to have its voice heard, and its right to security and dignified life respected,” he added.
Rehabilitation that wounds the rescuers
Ismail al-Dalf, president of the Yazidi House in Syria’s Jazira region, has seen the genocide's psychological reach extend far beyond Sinjar. His organization received 437 liberated captives, women and children, more than a decade ago in 2014, rescued from ISIS captivity, who needed not just shelter but help to reconstruct their identities.
Rather than placing survivors in institutions, they housed them with Yazidi families so they could relearn their culture, language, and dress, everything ISIS had tried to erase.
“In the first days, even for weeks sometimes, those liberated remained under the influence of deep extremist ideology’s shock, which sometimes prevented them from eating or adapting to normal life,” al-Dalf said.
The rehabilitation process lasted two weeks to a month, gradual and deliberate. But it left its mark on every family that opened its home. The crimes committed against Yazidi women and girls left wounds that haven't closed, not for survivors, not for those who helped them return.
Now his organization faces a different crisis: Keeping displaced Yazidis in Syria at all. Most families displaced from Ras al-Ain now occupy empty houses in Yazidi villages depopulated by emigration to Europe. Communities in Amuda, Kobani and Hassakeh that once thrived and now serve as temporary shelter for those who lost what little they had.
“Living in a house that isn't yours, in a village that isn’t yours, with constant waiting to return, this is the condition of most displaced people,” he said.
His greatest fear is that this displacement becomes permanent emigration, and that Yazidi identity dissolves across borders.
“What we fear today is that this displacement will turn into final emigration outside Syria, threatening the loss of Yazidi identity itself,” he said.
Double exposure
Sally Khurshid, 29, studied physics but never worked in her field. Displacement interrupted that life before it could begin.
The first time she had left her village in Afrin years ago was in 2018, as battles erupted and violence spread, while hundreds of civilians moved in search of a safe haven, fleeing the war.
“After that, we settled in the Sheikh Maqsoud neighborhood in the city of Aleppo, and kept ourselves busy trying to rebuild what had crumbled of our lives,” she said. “Over time, I began to feel some sense of stability, until we suddenly found ourselves forced to displace again as security tensions escalated, and the decision was made to move toward Hasakah. The sounds of fear echoed within me like a shadow that never left with each new displacement.”
“The issue isn't just fear of death,” she added, “but fear as a Yazidi woman forced to flee without protection or guarantees. Every new displacement journey brings back past fears to weigh down a present lacking real protection for minorities”.
Human rights activist Sawsan Zakzak frames this as accumulated anxiety with deep structural roots.
“Yazidis, as a religious minority subjected to documented genocide at the hands of ISIS, found themselves again facing an insecure security and political scene that didn't provide them real guarantees against repeating the tragedy,” Zakzak said.
The Aleppo clashes, she added, had brought old fears to the surface, the fear of being thrown into conflicts they had no stake in, of being seen as a group that could be violated at the first security tremor.
The mathematics of erasure
Al-Dalf said that constant displacement of Yazidis has resulted in high levels of anxiety.
“They are not alone in living under the specter of genocide, these fears extend to all minorities in Syria in the face of the ongoing threat from extremist and radical factions,” he said.
Al-Dalf said this “anxiety is shared across different communities, particularly given the crimes the country has witnessed against minorities, Druze, Alawites, Kurds, and others, where patterns of killing, rape, and abduction of girls recur, crimes that extremists justify through deviant ideologies that consider such acts permissible.”
Despite this, the head of the Yazidi House stressed that this characterization does not apply to the Syrian army as a whole.
“There are many honorable and patriotic individuals within it, but that certain extremist factions inside the army bear no resemblance in thought or conduct to Syrian society,” he added. “They have come from various countries, know nothing of Syria's history or the coexistence of its communities, and adopt an exclusionary ideology that considers anyone who differs from them in religion or belief a target for killing or annihilation.”
This article is published in collaboration with Egab.
Younes Al Ali is a journalist based in Syria.