Photojournalist Giles Clarke on a nation’s fragile recovery and the work still to be done.
"In April of 2016, amid fierce ongoing battles between ISIS and U.S.-backed coalition forces, I journeyed by car over the Sinjar Mountains in Iraq, near the Syrian border. I was traveling with Peshmerga fighters — Kurdish security forces — as part of a military convoy from Erbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan. There were three soldiers in the vehicle, including one commander. The mood was tense. They had lost a lot of people. Still, they were resolute. The Peshmerga were very much on their own in northern Iraq. They had beaten back ISIS cells all over Western Kurdistan, and their mission now was to hold ground and create safe supply routes.
There was only one road through the mountains into Sinjar itself — the same road some 50,000 ethnic Yazidi civilians used to flee when ISIS militants invaded the town in August of 2014. We passed displaced families living in tents on the rocky land. Though it had been 18 months since that initial incursion — which prompted President Obama to order U.S. airstrikes on ISIS targets in the area, kicking off America’s prolonged and bloody war with the Islamic State — Sinjar was still an active front line. Mortar shells were lying on the ground. Buildings were burning. Peshmerga were lobbing mortars toward the battle zone some 500 yards away. One man in one shop was selling food to the Peshmerga fighters; all the other civilians had left. Although I was only on the ground in Sinjar for a few hours that day, it offered a graphic look at what ISIS had done and how it had destroyed this Yazidi town. Even today, there are some 2,800 women and children missing from Sinjar, most of whom were kidnapped and taken to Syria.
This past September, I returned to Sinjar with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), which provides aid to war-torn and underdeveloped countries. As we drove in, I was overcome with the strange feeling that not much had changed. Sinjar is still heavily ringed by checkpoints and there is rubble everywhere. The old part of town is in ruins, still littered with ISIS booby traps. But as I walked around the new town center, which is being developed a few hundred yards away, there were signs of life. Small businesses are opening, and I was welcomed with smiles.
Over that six-week trip, we covered 1,700 miles in Iraq, from Fallujah to Diyala, Kirkuk across to Sinjar. Throughout the country, there were glimmers of hope and countless testimonies of the Iraqi people’s resilience. UNDP has stepped in to help address some basic needs, supporting local businesses such as bakeries and auto mechanics, developing new ID cards, and setting up protected databases and other technological infrastructure. In Mosul, which saw the worst fighting since Stalingrad in World War II, many have returned. The Mosul University library, once home to more than two million books and rare writings, became the ISIS headquarters in 2015, and was destroyed by Allied bombing. Today, it has reopened, with libraries from around the world donating to bolster its shelves. A few miles away, in the still bombed-out part of the Old City, a small museum has reopened to celebrate Mosul’s rich heritage. There are shops on the ground floors of buildings still damaged from the aerial onslaught. To the south, Baghdad, Iraq’s capital city of nine million, is thriving. I met dozens of women studying to be doctors, nurses, and trauma specialists, drawn to help their fellow countrymen still suffering from the debilitating effects of 20-plus years of war.
Everyone in Iraq is busy and doing their best to move forward — but the scars of that time run deep. ISIS displaced more than four million people. I visited Kurdish camps where nearly two million Iraqis had fled, which still house thousands and thousands of people. Many had left their homes with literally nothing. Some men lost wives and children. There are children who’ve lost years of schooling. Women who lost babies through health and violence. Everywhere I went, I met people who’d lost someone. There’s deep and likely lasting generational trauma that may never go away.
It’s true, too, that ISIS never really left. A new threat is looming as another fundamentalist Islamic organization — the Al Qaeda splinter group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS — has seized control of the Syrian capital of Damascus, and President Bashar al-Assad has reportedly fled. The volatility is a massive danger to the fragile recovery in the region. I can only imagine that this new tension and uncertainty will arouse all sorts of traumatic episodes. Despite the progress happening in Iraq, every day there is tinged with anxiety and scarred by the brutality of ISIS.
During one stop on my trip, in a more rural area outside of Kirkuk called Hawija, I visited a man’s farm. He was happy to have his land. There was a spirit of gratefulness about him and relief, as with so many of the people I met. There’s a genuine desire to just get on with it, move ahead, and provide for their families. At the same time, this man pulled out his phone rather suddenly to show me something. It was a video of ISIS slashing his son’s throat. Stunned, I asked him, through a translator, “Why are you showing me this?” He smiled faintly and said, "I'm showing it to you because people must know what happened, not only to my son but to the people here, by ISIS. We have been through this horror, which is why the world needs to know."
October 2024 with UNDP
