Freed From ISIS, Few Yazidis Return To Suffering Families, Many Remain Missing
Mazen looks like he wants to disappear into his gray hoody as he sits in the corner of a tent in a camp for displaced Yazidis in Iraq. The 13-year-old boy's eyes are haunted and huge in a face still gaunt from not getting enough to eat.
After almost five years held captive by ISIS, Mazen says he wants to talk about what happened to him but he doesn't have the words.
"How do I feel?" he says as if bewildered by the question. "Really I don't know how to feel."
Wrenched from his mother at age 8 after they were captured in 2014, Mazen says he and other boys were taught by ISIS in Iraq and Syria to shoot Kalashnikov assault rifles. He was being trained to kill his own people — members of the ancient Yazidi community.
Mazen is one of the survivors of ISIS' campaign of genocide against the . ISIS considers the
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