LEADERS of the Yazidi community have announced plans for an internationally funded new village in Iraq to prompt survivors of the Islamic State (Isis) genocide a decade ago to return home, the Morning Star reports.
In 2014, Kocho was decimated by the jihadist group. Hundreds of Yazidi men and boys were separated from their families and massacred, while women and children were abducted and many were raped or enslaved.
The village was one of many in the wider Sinjar region where the Isis terrorists massacred Yazidis.
Earlier this year, the Iraqi government ordered displacement camps in the Kurdish region housing thousands of Yazidis to be closed by July 30, but Baghdad later postponed the order.
Fatima Ismael, a survivor who has been living in a displacement camp in northern Iraq’s semi-autonomous Kurdish region for nine years and who hopes to settle in the new village, said the old settlement contains too many painful memories.
The remains of her husband and two of her sons were found in a mass grave, while three other sons are still missing, with empty graves waiting for them at the local cemetery.
“I can never return home because I can’t look at the empty rooms,” she said. “How can I live with that?”
