Rhino: Agencies – Fahd Qasim was 11 years old when he was captured by Islamic State militants in an attack on Yazidis in the Sinjar region of northern Iraq in August 2014.

The attack was the beginning of what became a systematic campaign to kill, enslave and rape thousands of Yazidis, shocking the world and displacing most of the 550,000-strong religious minority. Thousands were captured and killed in the first attack, which began in the early hours of 3 August.

Many more are believed to have died in captivity. Survivors fled to the foothills of Mount Sinjar, where some were trapped for weeks by an IS siege.

The militant group’s attack on the Yazidis, an ancient religious minority living in eastern Syria and north-western Iraq whose beliefs are derived from Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, was part of its efforts to establish a caliphate.

At one point, the group controlled a third of Iraq and Syria before it was pushed back by US-backed forces and Iranian-backed factions and collapsed in 2019.

Now 21, Qassim lives in a small apartment on the edge of a refugee camp in Iraq’s Kurdistan region, far from his hometown.

“I would rather get out of Iraq,” he said, explaining that he is waiting for news of a visa application to a Western country.

Many share Qassim’s reluctance to return. Ten years after what many governments and UN agencies have described as a genocide, the Sinjar region remains largely devastated.