Jinda Asmen/JINHA

SHENGAL – The thousands of Êzidî children living in camps for the last 10 months since Daesh forces attacked their city are beginning to smile again, as they and their families build a new life clinging to the slopes of Mt. Shengal.

On August 3, 2014, Daesh gang members wrote another chapter in the long history of state-supported and ordered massacres against the Êzidî people. In the attack on the city of Shengal, Daesh slaughtered thousands of Êzidîs and captured approximately 7,000 women, children and elderly to sell in "slave markets" set up across the region. YPG/YPJ forces intervened to form a security corridor to evacuate many Êzidîs across the border to Rojava. Others fled to the sacred site of Mt. Shengal, where they set up camps under the protection of YJA Star and HPG guerrillas. Êzidîs in the mountain camp have now started forming their own assemblies, self-governance mechanisms and self-defense forces.

The self-organized assemblies have opened schools in the camps for these children. Many of the children are becoming literate in their native Kurdish language for the first time in their lives in the education program, currently operating in seven tents distributed throughout the camp. However, in many ways, the work of the education program is about more than mere training. The educators have been working to help bring "childhood" back into the lives of these survivors.

JINHA joined the children for a picnic expedition, one of the activities set up to enrich their lives. It was perhaps the first time in months that the children got to run, laugh and play the games that are impossible in the muddy makeshift roads of their tent city.

Many of the women and children here have reached this camp after escaping Daesh captivity by their own devices and returning to their homeland of Shengal. While for the women resistance can mean joining self-defense trainings to fight back against the attack on their people and their sex, when it comes to the children, the smiles on their faces are a form of resistance all their own.

(fk/cm)