A Yazidi woman walks through the Khanke camp in northern Iraq in February.
DOHUK, Iraq — With rows of white tents filling a windswept hillside, the Khanke camp in northern Iraq shelters about 14,000 men, women and children from the Yazidi religious minority. They have been stuck here since ISIS invaded their home villages in 2014.
With its dirt roads and drab dwellings, the camp can be a bleak place. But the beat of a
daf, a drum sacred to Yazidis, throbs underneath loud, energetic singing, rising over shouts of children in a trash-strewn playground.
Inside a small building, a dozen young Yazidi women are rehearsing folk songs. They sing about the dawn, the harvest and the Sinjar mountain the Yazidis consider holy. Sometimes their voices harmonize gently, sometimes they rise almost to a shout as the women chant.