I will begin my story from 2013, the year before the displacement when I was thirteen years old.

We lived in a mud house surrounded by other mud houses and the streets were hard earth, unpaved. We had a simple life and there were around fifty houses in the village and we were all relatives. There were no worries, we were happy and contented with what we had.

There was a school in the village which all children attended. Each classroom had about eight or so children. My class had five boys and I was one of three girls. Our schools were also built from mud and the classrooms where shared, so for example year four and five were together.

We used to mess around with the makeshift nylon partitioning in the room to distract the other pupils in the other years. I laugh every time I remember how innocent we were and the simplest things that made us smile.

My father and uncles were working as blacksmiths in Sinjar Junction. We only visited Sinjar once or twice a year because my father and uncles worked long hours, but this is the case with all other Yazidis.

Before Daesh came we had electricity and water, but the water in the village was salty, so we used to buy drinking water. We had two types of electricity, the national rationed version and the one that we got through the generator.

Our home was very close to areas that were dominated by Arabs. In 2014, before we fled our home, I was with my grandmother. She raised me and we all lived in one house. One day, my grandmother and I, and two of my sisters were sleeping in the courtyard which had a few beds, and we heard lots of car noises, they were Daesh members.

The village Mukhtar prevented people from leaving their homes denouncing it as a shameful act to do. This continued for a few days.

The day before we fled our home a quarrel broke out between Yazidis and the Arabs surrounding our village. They started shelling our houses and the situation got incredibly heated and yet we were still not allowed to leave.

We were hoping things would calm down but they didn’t.

We had another house that was next to ours, which wasn’t a full house then, it was just the shell of a building. We headed there because it was more shielded from the gunfire.

My cousin and another relative of ours remained with us overnight, they couldn’t return to their homes because they didn’t want to be caught in the crossfire.

We all laid on the floor and slept there that night. In the early morning, I woke up and found that my parents had returned to our house, I didn’t know if things had settled outside or what was happening but I followed my parents back to our home. I sat on the doorstep outside, and suddenly a bullet passed by my side and I started screaming.

My mother screamed at me to come indoors. Meanwhile, my uncle’s wife was taking her son to the toilet, which was outside the main house, she came back running saying she just heard neighbours talking outside saying that the Peshmerga had withdrawn from their locations.

My father went out to check and came back saying that everyone had started leaving. We were around fifteen people, we only had one car - a pickup, and we all crammed ourselves on board apart from my cousin who said he would go to his house, and my father who refused to get in the car too. But my mother and grandparents insisted that my father join us, so he did.

I have a big family, my parents, I have three sisters and two brothers, four uncles, two of whom had wives and each had one child, a boy and a girl, and my grandparents.

I remember sobbing looking at our house as we were driving off.

My younger brother told my mother that he forgot his shoes in the house. We headed to a relative’s house inside Sinjar, but my grandfather said we should leave Sinjar, Sinjar is not safe, let’s head to the mountain.

We took some water with us and we got up the mountain through its winding roads. The car struggled to go up the hill given the weight it was carrying so my three uncles decided to get off and walk.

There was only one other person we knew, we had no idea what was happening to the rest of our relatives. My sister and uncle were not with us, they were at my aunt’s house and we had no idea what is happening to them. We tried to contact people we knew and the news came that Daesh has attacked Sinjar.

Meanwhile, my uncles were walking at the bottom of the mountain had not reached the top yet and still no word from any of our relatives.

We remained at the top of the mountain until my uncles made it. If they had carried on just walking they would have got caught by Daesh, but they were picked up by another relative’s car on the way up.

My younger sister and my aunt’s daughter were both a couple of months old, my grandfather said we can’t stay here with the children, so we headed towards the north of Iraq.

On the way we filled the car with petrol and we took some fruit and vegetables with us from a nearby farm. We warned the farm owner to flee because Daesh was advancing, they said we will leave right behind you. On the road, their car broke down so we ended up taking four people from their car into ours.

We reached Derabun, we were hoping to stay there for a few days and then return back to our homes after things calm down. There was a petrol station, so we parked nearby and remained there overnight. In the morning, we started checking on relatives again, we discovered that my recently wedded aunt and her husband were trapped inside the village surrounded by Daesh.

We needed to find a place to stay, so we headed to Sharya where there was a relative living there, so we headed to their place. He showed us the way to an abandoned building structure to stay in until we find a better solution. We spent five days there, and on day five, we were told that Daesh had reached Sharya.

It was night and we didn’t know what to do, we heard the Iraqi-Turkish border is open so we decided to head to Türkiye.

Before we arrived to Zakho, there was a big space where all the large goods trucks would park, we slept there overnight on cardboard.

In the morning we reached Zakho to a place called Tel Keper which also had some abandoned buildings, so we decided to remain there because we were all worried about my sister and my uncle and others who haven’t made it to safety yet.

A few days later we heard from my uncle and sister saying that they were going to cross into Syria and then they will be dropped off into Kurdistan Iraq and they asked if someone can go to pick them up from there.

My father decided to go but he couldn’t see them.

Later we heard from them that they made it to Kurdistan after terrifying few days in the mountain. My aunt who was with them too, had three small boys and she couldn’t carry them all, so she was saved by the fact that one of my uncles and my sister were with her to help.

We were grateful to see them all safe and with us.

We remained in Tel Keper in Zakho for one year in these abandoned buildings. Life was beyond difficult. We had no electricity till we wanted to leave to do to the camps. The actual building was just a shell. It was far away from the centre; we were on the periphery. There was no water. The streets unpaved so when it rained the whole place turns into a mud pool. In the summer, it was unbearable too, too hot and nothing to shelter you from the hot wind. People had no cars to bring things from the centre. There were over a hundred of families with us with no services or infrastructure.

I was young, only fourteen years old, but we had to make several journeys a day to pick up water from the centre which was very far to do on foot. Despite the weather, under the scorching sun and in the cold and rain, children were tasked with this chore. Children also used to scavage a landfill site nearby to go and collect plastic bottles and we use them to shower.

There was a mountain nearby and we used to pick up dry sticks and wood, bring it back so that our mothers will light up fires to cook and heat the water. We used to carry the wood on our backs. It was incredibly a basic life. It was a whole year that I will never forget.

We then moved to Mamreshan Camp in Sheikhan. We remained there till three years ago when we decided to come back to Sinjar.

We wanted to stay in the camp but my father insisted we leave. There was nothing to stay there for, he had no work, but also we had no means to rebuild here so it was a hard decision. When we were in Zakho, my father managed to get a job working on a camp site there. He had a similar job afterwards in Sheikhan alongside with my uncles, so me and my grandmother joined them for 3 months to cook and support them.

When that job in Sheikhan finished, he got another job working on another camp site called Camp Essiyan and we followed him there too for forty days.

Shortly after we moved to Mamreshan Camp which was safer, had electricity and water. Each family had a cabin in the camp. The camp also had a school where my sisters went to. I missed two school years, one in Zakho and one in this camp because I couldn’t go to the upper secondary school because there wasn’t any in the camp. The year after that I attended the final year of the intermediate school in the camp and then I decided to go into college instead of secondary school.

We had to pay for my place at the college and I worked really hard and put a lot of pressure on myself to do well. Before I finished my final year, the Corona Pandemic hit us. I remained at home for a long time and I wasn’t going out because I wanted to do well at college. Each cabin in the camp had two rooms , my family made that spare room mine just so that I can finish my exams. It was two years of this kind of pressure, during which my parents were also working in the summer months in a farm to sustain ourselves and I used to stay with my uncles’ families in the camp to finish my revisions for exams.