The airline Royal Jordanian is suspending flights to Beirut on Monday and Tuesday, according to television

SINJAR, Iraq: When Rihan Ismail returned to her family home in the heart of her Yazidi community, she was sure she would return forever.
During the long years of her imprisonment, she had longed for this moment.
Daesh fighters had kidnapped the then teenage Ismail as they moved through the Iraqi district of Sinjar, killing and enslaving thousands of members of the Yazidi religious minority.
When she was taken from Iraq to Syria, she clung to what home meant: a childhood full of laughter, a community so close that the neighbor’s house was like her own. After her captors took her to Turkey, she finally managed to get a phone, contact her family and plan a rescue.
“How could I leave again?” Ismail, 24, told the Associated Press last year, shortly after returning to her village of Hardan.
Reality quickly caught up.
The house where she lives with her brother’s family is one of the few still standing in the village. A school nearby houses displaced families.
Her father and younger sister are still missing. Three of her brothers are buried in a local cemetery, along with 13 other men and boys killed by Daesh.
Ismail passes by it every time she has to run an errand in a neighboring town.
“It feels like you’re dying 1,000 deaths between here and there,” she said.
Ten years after the Daesh attack, more and more Yazidis are returning to their homes in Sinjar. But despite the great emotional and religious significance of their homeland, many see no future there.
There is a lack of money to rebuild the destroyed houses. The infrastructure is still destroyed. Several armed groups are making the area unsafe.
And the landscape is haunted by terrible memories. In August 2014, militants stormed through Sinjar, determined to wipe out the small, insular religious group they viewed as heretics. They killed men and boys, sold women into sex slavery or forced them to convert and marry militants. Those who were able to do so fled.
Seven years have passed since Daesh was defeated in Iraq. But by April 2024, only 43 percent of the more than 300,000 people displaced from Sinjar had returned, according to the International Organization for Migration.
Some fear that the community could lose its identity if the Yazidis do not return.
“Without Sinjar, Yazidism would be like a dying cancer patient,” says Hadi Babasheikh, the brother and office manager of the late Yazidi spiritual leader who held that office during Daesh’s atrocities.
This strategically located, remote corner of northwest Iraq near the Syrian border has been home to the Yazidis for centuries, with villages scattered across a semi-arid plain.
Rising from the lowlands are the Sinjar Mountains, a long, narrow range that is considered sacred to the Yazidis. Legend has it that Noah’s Ark landed on this mountain after the flood. The Yazidis fled to the heights to escape Daesh, as they had done during previous waves of persecution.
In the town of Sinjar, the district’s center, soldiers hang around outside small shops on the main street. A livestock market draws buyers and sellers from neighboring villages and beyond. A few reconstruction crews work among stacks of cinder blocks.
But in the outskirts, the signs of destruction are still visible everywhere: collapsed houses, abandoned gas stations. Water pipes, health facilities, schools, and even religious shrines have not been rebuilt. The most important Sunni Muslim district of the city of Sinjar lies largely in ruins.
The central government in Baghdad and the authorities of the semi-autonomous northern Kurdish region are fighting over Sinjar, where each government supports a rival local government.
This conflict is now reflected in a debate about the refugee camps in the Kurdish region, where many of those who fled Sinjar are housed.
Baghdad ordered the camps to be closed by July 30 earlier this year and offered payments of four million dinars (about $3,000) to residents who leave the camps.
Karim Al-Nouri, deputy minister for displaced persons, said this month that the difficulties of returning to Sinjar had been “overcome,” but Kurdish authorities have no intention of evicting camp residents.
Sinjar is “not suitable as a place for people to live,” said Khairi Bozani, an adviser to Kurdish regional president Nechirvan Barzani.
“The job of government is to move people from a bad place to a good place, not the other way around.”
Khudeida Murad Ismail refuses to leave the camp in Dohuk where he runs a makeshift shop. He says he would lose his livelihood and the compensation would not be enough to rebuild his house. If the camps are closed, he says he will stay in the area and look for other work.
But some return. On June 24, Barakat Khalil’s family of nine left the city of Dohuk, which had been their home for almost a decade.
They now live in a small rented house in the city of Sinjar. They have repaired the broken doors and windows and are gradually furnishing it. They have even planted geraniums. Their old home in a nearby village has been destroyed.
“We stayed there for two months and then they (the Daesh fighters) came and blew it up,” he said.
Now, “it’s a completely new life – we don’t know anyone here,” says Khalil’s 25-year-old daughter Haifa Barakat, the only family member currently working, in the pharmacy at the local hospital.
Although life in Sinjar is bearable at the moment, she is worried about safety.
In different parts of the territory, the Iraqi army and Kurdish Peshmerga forces patrol, as well as various militias that came to fight against Daesh and never left.
These include, above all, the Sinjar Resistance Units (YBS), a Yazidi militia that is part of the predominantly Shiite Popular Mobilization Forces.
Turkey regularly carries out air strikes against its members because it is allied with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a Kurdish separatist group that has waged an insurgency in Turkey.
The presence of armed groups sometimes made reconstruction difficult. In 2022, a damaged school in Sinjar was being rehabilitated by a Japanese NGO. Instead, Japanese officials complained that a militia had taken it over.
This month, the Nineveh Provincial Council finally voted to appoint a single mayor for Sinjar, but his confirmation was delayed due to disputes.
Aspiring mayor, school administrator and community activist Saido Al-Ahmady said he hopes to restore services so more displaced people can return.
But many of those who have returned say they are thinking about leaving the country again.
In the village of Dugure on a recent evening, children rode bicycles and women in robes chatted in front of their houses as the sun set.
Rihan Ismail, who once dreamed of returning to Sinjar, now wants to leave.
“You wouldn’t be able to forget it. But at least you wouldn’t have to watch your village being destroyed like this every time you come or go,” she said.