[Reporter] For Sinjar resurrection still awaits.
And so too the return of the Yazidi people.
Their trust is shattered as the buildings that once sheltered them.
Almost seven years after ISIS unleashed its genocidal wrath
against the ethnic and religious minority
there is still no path home for many.
Not for the dead in mass graves awaiting exhumation.
Not for the survivors still living in refugee camps
Even those who've come back talk of leaving.
We have nothing left in our cities, says 38-year-old Najaf Mirza.
No services, no job opportunities.
He says he's not at the market to buy sheep.
He's here because he has nothing else to do.
Our message is for Canada, Australia the Europeans
to take us from Sinjar mountain.
We have no future as Yazidis in the Middle East.
When ISIS swept through Yazidi heartland in Northern Iraq in 2014
those who could fled to Mount Sinjar.
Hundreds perished in harsh conditions
and in the lands around it thousands of men were massacred
and thousands of women and children abducted.
The Iraqi parliament has passed a survivor's bill for Yazidi women
calling for compensation.
But advocates fear it's lip service only.
It's not just the lack of jobs and reconstruction in Sinjar
it's also the lack of security.
Since ISIS was pushed out in 2015
other groups and militias have moved in including the PKK.
The Kurdistan Workers Party.
It was the PKK who helped provide an escape route for many people fleeing Sinjar
into neighbouring Syria.
But the PKK is also blacklisted by western governments
and waging a guerrilla war against Turkey
making Sinjar a target.
Baghdad and the Kurdish regional government signed a deal last October
agreeing to push militias out
but it hasn't happened.
And we were only allowed in with an Iraqi army escort.
Of an estimated 400,000 Yazidis displaced
over half are still living in refugee camps
blanketing Iraqi Kurdistan like this one near Zakho.
[Woman] I remember everything.
It's unforgettable.
I will not forget that we were hungry and tired and I remember that I can't walk.
I was not able to walk but I tried.
[Reporter] Lena Thero is now 21.
Her family escaped ISIS via Mount Sinjar but not what it left in its wake.
The number of suicides amongst Yazidis in the camps especially young women is rising.
I feel if I am Yazidi I am nothing.
Because we are nothing.
No one wants us, we are nothing.
No one see us.
Many Yazidis feel betrayed by the Peshmerga
the Kurdish soldiers who left them defenceless when they withdrew from areas around Sinjar
as ISIS advanced.
And by Arab neighbours, they say did little to help them.
Now they believe the world has forgotten them
and those still missing.
Abdullah Scherem is still looking for the missing.
A Yazidi businessman, he's already credited with rescuing 399 ISIS captives.
Children taken as fighters or slaves.
Women to be raped.
He takes out his maps to show us how he did it.
Syrian contacts advising him to make friends with cigarette smugglers.
Their trade already a death sentence if ISIS were to catch them.
He got started by looking for 56 members of his own family .
Eventually he ran a network of informants in cities like Raqqa controlled by ISIS.
After the liberation, he says, our job became much harder.
Because Yazidis are now spread out in other places where ISIS has escaped to.
Youngsters may no longer remember who they are
and it takes money to pay smugglers or ransoms.
The Kurdish government used to help but not anymore
on top of that the international community isn't aware of us he says
and so far the Iraqi government hasn't helped us either.
He still carries hope but not Lena
who wants to get as far away from the entire region as soon as possible.
She's seen their old home in Sinjar.
I feel like my heart destroyed not that house
and it was my childhood there.
How I will live there again?
It will not be rebuilt again.
A view you would never expect to see from the innocence of a school window.
What was once a playground now a burial ground .
Almost all the men and boys from the village of Kojo were slaughtered by ISIS.
The bodies of 103 buried here in February.
Their names finally returned to them after DNA testing.
Bhajat Khalil was away working in Kurdistan when ISIS came.
Now his world is defined by duty to the dead.
Guarding the graves of friends and relatives.
Duty to the living is just as hard.
The Yazidis can only stay here with international protection, he says.
Not Iraqi because Muslims want to destroy us.
The fear for so many Yazidis is that with all that has collapsed around them
and all that they've lost
it is the indifference of a watching world that will finish what ISIS began.
The shattering of a people now caught in a no-man's land between the living and the dead.
Margaret Evans CBC News, Sinjar.