Enas, whose last name is being withheld because she is a minor, wore jeans and a colorful sweater, her long hair twisted into a tight bun.
It was April 2019 when we met at the camp’s “psychosocial center,” a cluster of modular buildings on the edge of a field blooming with yellow flowers. One morning, she woke to learn that her uncle and his lover had killed themselves. Her family escaped on foot, sleeping in empty stores at night. Enas is a Yazidi, a Kurdish religious minority group of some 700,000 people, most of whom lived west of Mosul in a district called Sinjar. She often dreamed about the night that ISIS came to kill the men in her village and enslave the women. She was too scared to go to the hospital and see her cousin’s melted skin.
Two weeks earlier, her 16-year-old cousin lit herself on fire in a camp bathroom, next door to Enas’s tent. At its peak, Duhok was home to nearly half a million people displaced by the Islamic State, also known as ISIS. Mamrashan was just one of 16 camps scattered around Duhok, a province smaller than Connecticut. For three years she’d been living in Mamrashan, a remote mountain camp for displaced people in the Kurdish region of northern Iraq.
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