For the Yazidi community, being able to get the closure of laying their loved ones to rest has been a long and almost impossible task.
Shammo Silo and his two daughters resettled in the New South Wales regional city of Wagga Wagga in 2019, but his wife and three sons are still missing - he fears they are now dead.
“No matter what, my heart will not be at ease,” he told SBS News. “All we want is to know what their fate is.”
The Yazidi are , and Mr Silo counts himself as one of the lucky ones.
He was away from his home village of Kocho in northern Iraq on 3 August 2014, having left in the early hours for work. It was on that day, known as "black day" by the Yazidi community, that his wife and seven children were held and separated by militants from the so-called Islamic State (IS) terrorist group.
It would be many months later before Mr Silo was able to reconnect with his youngest daughter, Iman.
She was only five when she was kidnapped and was among thousands of Yazidi children taken prisoner by IS in 2014. More than 3,000 were killed in her home district of Sinjar.
She was found by people smugglers hired by her father in neighbouring Turkey, living with a family loyal to the terrorist group.
In a video filmed shortly after she returned to her father, Iman - who was far too young to remember the circumstances of her earlier life - can be seen confused as to why she was being rescued and asks to be returned to her Turkish 'family'.
"I will get ready and in the morning come and take me to my [Turkish] mother," she says in the footage seen by SBS News.
“They were tortured by being deprived from sleep, from food and from water," Mr Silo said.
“They were subjected to all forms of torture, plus home duties from a young age.”
Iman is now 10, and her father wants her story to be heard.
She says she misses her mother and other siblings, and though she was young at the time, she remembers her childhood being torn apart by IS.
"It was so hard, they were bad to us," she said. "Sometimes they hit us and other bad things."
Iman is now a vice-president at her primary school and has hopes of studying medicine one day.
Landmark bill for survivors
Many Yazidi people feel the Iraqi government did not protect them from IS's systematic campaign of kidnapping and killing and believe they have made little progress since 2014 in addressing the long-term effects of the destruction caused by the group.
Last week, the Iraqi parliament passed a landmark bill that formally recognises the 2014 crimes committed against the Yazidi as a genocide, almost five years after the United Nations did the same. The law also provides reparations in the form of financial compensation as well as rehabilitation and medical treatment for women and girl survivors.
Dr Amy Bean, the author of The Last Yezidi Genocide and an independent human rights advocate for survivors, said the new law, titled The Yazidi Female Survivors Law, is a big step forward.
“Not only does this law stipulate compensation for survivors for the rest of their lives, but beyond that it legitimises what happened to them in the eyes of the world.
“For seven years, they've been asking Iraq to proclaim that what happened to them was genocide and they will work with other countries as well as the Iraqi judiciary to bring the members of IS to justice.”
Justice only just beginning
For many Yazidi people, although they welcome the passage of the new law - which had been before parliament for almost two years - they feel the road to justice and closure is just beginning.
Belinda Crain, the CEO of the Multicultural Council of Wagga Wagga, has helped dozens of Yazidi families resettle in Australia and said the community has "given up" on justice.
"They don't think there will be justice," she said. "The Yazidi people have gone through so many genocides, they see this as just another time they have been persecuted."
Arab Mato, who also received refugee status in 2019 and now lives in Wagga Wagga, still has 71 members of his extended family missing. Ten of them were identified in recent burials of more than 100 victims in Kocho.
Arab and Layla Mato are still looking for 71 members of their extended family. Source: Lin Evlin, SBS News
Dozens of mass graves in Sinjar are still awaiting exhumation and Mr Mato said he and his family are growing increasingly impatient. They feel the new law is "too little, too late".
“It is really important that remaining women and children who have been kidnapped are all returned. “Secondly, those who committed these crimes must be brought forward and tried in a court of law.”
William Wiley from the Commission for International Justice and Accountability (CIJA), a not-for-profit organisation that has been gathering evidence of IS crimes against the Yazidi people in Iraq over the past few years, said progress, while slow, is being made.
He said the CIJA has wound back its investigative operations in recent years since the United Nations established its team to investigate the crimes in late 2017.
“I agree with the assessment of the Yazidi survivors, that the process has been somewhat slow because international criminal justice, or justice for war crimes, crimes against humanity, takes time; the cases are complex," he said.
“But the pace of progress is ramping up, it takes domestic authorities some time to get their head around the issue but there is a lot of material out there so I’m confident we will see more prosecutions.”
