In the recaptured city of Sinjar, residents say destruction by ISIS 'can't be reversed'

The city of Sinjar, Iraq, has been reclaimed from the Islamic State, but former residents say it will never be the same.

On Friday, Kurdish fighters liberated Sinjar, which the United Nations estimates was home to 350,000 people before ISIS took over the town in August 2014; two-thirds belonged to the Yazidi religious minority, and most of the rest were Muslim. The Kurdish and allied forces found homes and buildings decimated, a mass grave filled with the bodies of elderly women and men, and the minaret, a symbol of the city, destroyed. "The city will be rebuilt again, but life in the city will not be back," Yazidi fighter Marwan Hussein Ali told The Wall Street Journal. "What was done to us is something that can't be reversed."

Sinjar was on a key route that ISIS used to move weapons and money between Iraq and Syria. Kurdish fighters said that dozens of ISIS militants were killed during the assault, and a Pentagon official said coalition airstrikes killed more than 200 fighters as they tried to escape. While the Yazidis are glad to have Sinjar back, Ali said that there are still more than 1,000 kidnapped Yazidi women with ISIS fighters, being sold between militants "in exchange for a bottle of Pepsi." Other Yazidi say they are angry that their Sunni Muslim neighbors, once considered friends, didn't do more to stop ISIS — or worse, joined them in killings. A Yazidi fighter named Khalaf Dhakheel Ceedo told the Journal that they "took the honor of Yazidis," and there's "no way" they will be welcome in Sinjar.

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