IN A DRESS AND black leggings, 16-year-old Shaima flicks through pictures and songs on her mobile phone. ‘I don’t play games on my phone,’ she says. ‘I look at my photos, listen to songs, record videos. I go to the supermarket and buy Pepsi, sometimes I come here to my uncle’s house – that sort of stuff.’
‘But most of the time, she’s with her phone,’ says her sister Suhaila, 18, with a grin. ‘Phone and sleep.’
The teenagers’ conversation might seem normal, but it hides the trauma of a painful past. Suhaila and Shaima were among more than 6,000 Yazidi women and children kidnapped by so-called Islamic State (IS) five years ago this month, as the terror group overran their historic homeland of Sinjar in northern Iraq.
The Yazidis…