Iraq’s ghost villages: Islamic State drove people away – now a new enemy is preventing their return. Nearly a decade after fighting ended in northern Iraq, the climate crisis has brought extreme heat and a water shortage, making life almost impossible

Rivers in the Sinjar region have dried up as rainfall has become more erratic and temperatures have risen

The village of Faka in Sinjar was overrun by Islamic State in 2014 and retaken in 2017. All [16] photographs: Chris Huby/Le Pictorium 

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2026/aug/18/northern-iraq-villages-islamic-state-climate-crisis 

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By Chris Huby, in Sinjar

The first thing that strikes visitors arriving in Faka, a small village in Sinjar district, northern Iraq, is the silence. No children play in the streets. No shops are open. Roofless houses stretch across the hillside, their walls pockmarked by shellfire, while weeds and wild grasses grow through collapsed living rooms.

A decade after Islamic State (IS) swept across the region, war remains visible everywhere. But according to the people who returned, another enemy has quietly taken its place.

“Today, the problem isn’t only IS,” says Rajab Mohammed, 62, the village’s mukhtar, standing above the ruins of Faka. “It’s water. It’s jobs. It’s the future.”

Across Sinjar, abandoned houses now outnumber occupied ones. The battle against IS has ended. The battle to save the villages against drought and neglect has only just begun, and time is not on its side.

Before August 2014, about 150 families lived in Faka. When IS fighters seized the Sinjar region, residents fled as frontlines advanced across north-western Iraq. In August 2014, IS launched what the UN has recognised as a genocide against the ethnic minority Yazidi community. Thousands were killed and more than 6,000 people, mostly women and children, were abducted.

While Faka and the nearby village of Qubq escaped the mass killings that devastated other nearby villages, coalition airstrikes and ground fighting left much of the area destroyed. Today, only about 20 families have returned. The rest have settled elsewhere, discouraged by the lack of reconstruction, jobs and basic services in a region where the climate crisis is making rural livelihoods such as farming increasingly precarious.

“People ask why families don’t come back. The answer is simple. Where would they live? How would they earn a living?” says Aqil Ridha from Qubq.

The UN has ranked the country the fifth most vulnerable to declining water and food availability and extreme heat. Iraqi authorities project that by 2050 the country’s average annual temperature will have risen by 2.5C, with 24 additional days a year crossing extreme heat thresholds. Temperatures in Sinjar this summer have approached 50C.

Rainfall has become increasingly erratic and summers are hotter and longer, while prolonged droughts are reducing agricultural production. The UN’s special representative for Iraq has warned that the country will be able to meet only 15% of its water needs by 2035 if current trends continue.

In rural areas, where farming remains the principal source of income, the issues of climate and migration have become inseparable. The International Organization for Migration has recorded more than 186,000 people displaced by climate-related factors across Iraq as of September 2025.

In the village of... READ MORE  https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2026/aug/18/northern-iraq-villages-islamic-state-climate-crisis 

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