SINJAR, Iraq (Dispatches) – After five years of massive atrocities committed against the Izadi minority by Daesh terrorists in Sinjar region, explosive remnants from the anti-Daesh war still pose a threat to civilians' lives in the region.
Through a project by the UN Mine Action Service (UNMAS), young men and women from the ravaged Izadi community have teamed up to take the matter into their own hands and clear explosive hazards from Sinjar and the surrounding villages in the northern province of Nineveh.
"To be honest, it is a dangerous trade. My mother didn't want me to sign up for the job but I'm the only one with an employment opportunity in the family and supporting them is a priority for me," Seido Khalaf, a resident in Sinjar, told Xinhua.
When the Daesh rampaged across Sinjar region in 2014, they destroyed the farmhouse of Khalaf's family and forced them into displacement.
"We had to leave for Duhok Province, where we lived in an unfinished structure and then in tents for four years," said Khalaf, now a deputy leader of an explosives clearance team.
"I'm not afraid," 24-year-old Fadia Murad told Xinhua when asked about joining the demining efforts.
"I felt happy the first time when I found an explosive device in the area. It was a main charger hidden underneath a shovel," she said.
Murad and her colleagues were working in Ain Tallawi, a rural village on the outskirts of Sinjar. They were clearing explosives from a school which was once used by Daesh terrorists as a base.
In Iraq, many areas are still inundated by improvised explosive devices.
In 2014, Sinjar was overrun by Daesh terrorists who killed thousands of Izadi men, kidnapped their women and forced them into sex slavery as well as recruiting Yazidi children into their ranks.
In the aftermath of liberation, the region was littered with explosive remnants that crippled the return of displaced families and the cultivation of farmlands in Sinjar.
There are two mixed-gender clearance teams, each comprising 14 searchers who all received two months of intensive training by the UNMAS partner G4S, a British multinational security company operating in Iraq.
So far, they have cleared the villages of al-Wardia, Ain Fathi and al-Hatmiyah and some families have started moving back to their homes there.