Thread by @ChloeNCornish

You open WhatsApp. There's a video of your daughter - you last saw her 5 yrs ago, when she was kidnapped by Isis. Now she's 10, wearing an abaya & speaking Arabic. The Saudi Isis fighter who originally held her is dead.

So who is shooting this video?

ft.com/content/cabb2f…

3 months ago this happened to one man. Let's call him Elias. Elias is from Iraq's minority Yazidi community, among scores of parents desperately trying to find children and female relatives captured by Isis in 2014. Now the "caliphate" has fallen. So where is Elias' little girl?

Families and Yazidi smugglers say that hundreds of Yazidi women and children in Syria are being held by people who aren’t Isis members. These new kidnappers are demanding up to $30,000 in ransoms.

(Yazidis tie knots in the fabric pictured for luck)

All Elias knows is that his daughter’s captors are Syrian, and that the latest videos they’ve sent seem to show her in a tent - he (& the smuggler helping him negotiate) reckons this means they’re not Isis. They’re traffickers. And they’re demanding $20,000 for her. A fortune.

We know that Yazidis have been kept in other parts of rebel-held Syria after leaving Isis territory, because some have returned to Iraq.

One man we spoke to had bought his sister and her son back from a captor holding her in Idlib.

This gentleman, Abdullah, fixed the rescue.

Maybe the worst part is families know they could get their kids back, if they had $$$$$$ to pay ransoms to these criminals. How do you do that when you're so poor you live in a tent? When prices were lower parents borrowed from friends, neighbours & relatives abroad, but $30,000?

This is a graveyard in Khanke, northern Iraq, close to where so many Yazidi families are still living in informal encampments. They’re still displaced 5 yrs after Isis drove them from their homeland, Sinjar, even though the extremists are long gone. Why?👉google.co.uk/amp/s/mobile.r…

In a tent close to this verdant scene, one mother who still has two children missing described the separation as like "losing part of your liver" - something so deep and painful inside you, it's not even like losing a limb. This, and so much else, absolutely broke me.

These post-Isis hostage-takings are further deepening Yazidis' justified sense of persecution, not just by Isis but by everyone. These new kidnappers could have freed these women and children - instead, they chose to profit from them. No wonder it's hard for Yazidis to feel safe.

For more on this story, listen to the voices of Yazidi children recently released from Isis captivity, in a piece by @janearraf

npr.org/2019/03/14/703…

And this dispatch from @nabihbulos on a sombre return party

latimes.com/world/la-fg-ir…