Khanke Displacement Camp: On the floor of her stuffy, dimly-lit tent in Iraq, Yazidi survivor Layleh Shemmo nimbly tugs floral pink fabric through her sewing machine, stitching together a living for her broken family.
Working in the Khanke displacement camp in the country’s northwest, Shemmo glances down at the name tattooed on her left hand: Kero, her husband, still missing five years after the IS group rampaged across the Sinjar region.
At the time, IS killed Yazidi men en masse, took boys as child soldiers with survivors streaming into ramshackle displacement camps.
They remain unable to return to Sinjar, where IS destroyed the fields and farming infrastructure that were the backbone of the ethno-religious minority’s livelihoods.
While it had long been frowned upon for Yazidi women to work publicly, survivors found themselves deprived of their family’s traditional breadwinners and with little state support.
So, they took matters into their own hands.
Dresses for a few dollars, baby clothes for the camp’s newborns, custom-made pillow cases — mother and former IS captive Shemmo can make them all, using a sewing machine and fabric donated by Sikh NGO Khalsa Aid.
“If I was sitting here with one hand on top of the other, I’d be constantly thinking about what IS did to me, why my husband isn’t here, where my two kids are, about my nine relatives still in IS hands,” says Shemmo.
“With the income from the sewing machine, I’m taking care of my son and daughters — my sister and brother-in-law, too,” she says, her eyes shining proudly behind edgy translucent glasses.
Abducted by IS when seven months pregnant, Shemmo gave birth in captivity, then was separated from her husband and children and trafficked by the fighters, who consider Yazidis heretics.
She and three of her children were freed, but her husband, two teenage children, and other loved ones remain missing. — AFP
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