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Religion in Iraq

Yazidi women released from ISIS captivity meet with Lalish's top spiritual leader, Baba Chawish, before being baptized back into the faith. They didn't want to show their faces.

Yazidi society changes to try and rescue a generation of traumatized women

Conflict

As ISIS overran Iraq’s Yazidi heartland in August 2014, the group kidnapped thousands of women and girls, forcing them to convert to Islam. In years past, they would have been forever shunned from Yazidi society. But now, the community and its faith are creating new ways to reintegrate the women.

Displaced women from the minority Yezidi sect. ISIS is increasingly subjecting women to rape, as well as forced conversions and marriage.

Some Yazidi women who have escaped ISIS barbarism aren’t hopeful for their futures

Belief
Displaced people from the minority Yazidi sect, who fled the violence in the Iraqi town of Sinjar, walk in the Bajed Kadal refugee camp southwest of Dohuk province on August 15, 2014.

Yazidis in America are consumed by the fate of their relatives in Iraq

Belief
Displaced demonstrators from the minority Yazidi sect gather during a protest against militants of ISIS in Irbil on August 4, 2014.

A trench is all that stands between ISIS and some Iraqi refugees

Conflict
Displaced people, who fled from the violence in the province of Nineveh, arrive at Sulaimaniya province August 8, 2014. The United States began to drop relief supplies to beleaguered Yazidi refugees fleeing Islamist militants in Iraq, but there was no imm

The situation in Iraq is ‘a humanitarian crisis that could turn into a genocide’

Conflict
The World

Iraq sect finds a home in the US

Conflict & Justice

Correspondent Tina Antolini reports on some Iraqis who’ve made their new home in Worcester, Massachusetts. They’re members of the Mandaean religion – a sect that predates Islam. Since 2003 religious persecution in Iraq has caused most of the Mandaean population there to flee – scattering around the globe.