In the Yazidi village of Tel Qasab, Iraq, delighted neighbors welcome Nofa Khudeda as she walks into the house she fled six years ago when ISIS invaded the region. Khudeda, wearing a beige print dress with a white scarf tied loosely around her dark hair, hands out colorfully wrapped chocolates in celebration.
“It’s a beautiful feeling to be home,” she says, surrounded by beaming neighbors and relatives who returned a few weeks ago from camps for displaced Yazidis in northern Iraq.
In the summer of 2014, ISIS embarked on a campaign of genocide in northern Iraq’s Sinjar region, intent on killing, capturing and forcibly converting members of the ancient religion they considered infidels. Thousands of women were taken into sexual slavery.