• last year
Transcript
00:00 This is a village that never recovered from ISIS.
00:04 There were around 100 houses here, but this is all that's left.
00:09 Before the conflict, I was living here.
00:12 This is my house, and this is my father's house below.
00:15 When ISIS came and attacked this area, they took control.
00:18 That is why we left for Mosul city.
00:20 We stayed there for around two and a half years,
00:22 at which point we moved to a camp where we lived for seven years
00:25 until we were able to return last September.
00:27 I prefer living here compared to the camps
00:29 because in the camps life is limited and you have no privacy.
00:32 Living in tents is very challenging.
00:34 Around 40 families received permission to return to the village.
00:37 Most of them saw the situation and conditions here.
00:40 They went back to live in other areas.
00:42 Only nine families have returned so far.
00:44 I had only recently built my house before ISIS came.
00:46 My house is mostly destroyed.
00:48 I use the one muddy room to stay in.
00:50 Before the conflict, most of the families relied on agriculture,
00:53 breeding livestock.
00:55 You don't have any services here.
00:57 No water, no education, even the infrastructure is damaged.
01:00 It was really difficult for us,
01:02 living displaced for seven years and losing everything.
01:04 There's so many people who have said that when they came back to their village
01:08 they found their homes booby-trapped, their areas mined.
01:12 And many of them were injured in this or even killed.
01:16 People would pick something up that they didn't recognise
01:19 or move a bucket which would have been booby-trapped
01:21 or stood on something that they didn't know was explosive.
01:25 When you become someone like this, you can see so easily how that would happen.
01:29 It really spells out the very human cost of ISIS's reign of terror.
01:35 [BLANK_AUDIO]

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