When Jessen asks Berges Matto to recount his story, the man clasps his hands together, breathes deeply and nods. Silence falls over the room as he recounts how his family were living in a village in Sinjar when IS militants turned up.
"They came and captured us. They wanted to force us to change religion," he explains, saying it was a miracle that he and his family were able to escape into the mountains.
They were lucky. According to the US-based NGO Yazda, some 12,000 people were kidnapped or killed in the first week of what the UN has characterized as the Yazidi genocide in August 2014.
Thousands were forced to flee, and many died as a result. IS fighters killed older people, along with those who were too weak to flee and those who refused to convert to Islam. They kidnapped and indoctrinated children. Boys were trained to become IS fighters, and women and girls were sold into sexual slavery. Thousands of Yazidis are still missing. Many mass graves have been found, but not all of them have been exhumed. ...
The volatile security situation is the main reason not all Yazidis want to come back. And for many survivors, it's simply unthinkable to come back to a place inhabited by their tormentors. "Quite a few supporters and even active IS fighters [were] living in the Arab villages and towns near the Yazidi settlements, and some of them still live there," says Schmidinger.
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