Iraq’s Yazidis hope a new village will prompt survivors of a 2014 ISIS massacre to return

Ten years ago, their village in Iraq’s Sinjar region was decimated by Islamic State militants. Yazidi men and boys were separated and massacred, Yazidi women and children were abducted, many raped or taken as slaves.

Now the survivors are coming back to Kocho, where Yazidi community leaders on Thursday announced plans for an internationally funded new village nearby to house those displaced in what was one of the bloodiest massacres by the Islamic State group against their tiny and insular religious minority.

On Aug. 15, 2014, the extremists killed hundreds in Kocho alone. During their rampage across the wider region of Sinjar — the Yazidi heartland — IS killed and enslaved thousands of Yazidis, whom the Sunni militants consider heretics. To this day, the Kocho massacre remains as a glaring example of IS atrocities against the Yazidi community.

Out of 1,470 people in Kocho at the time, 1,027 were abducted by the IS, 368 were killed and only 75 managed to escape, according to a report by the Middle East Center at the London School of Economics.

All the permits have now been finalized and construction for the new village will break ground on Sept. 5, said Naif Jaso, a prominent Yazidi leader.