Nawaf Haskan is a poet. His poem “Five Sisters” appeared in the Spring 2016 issue of Iowa Review:

Over there, in that sleeping town,
beyond those hills that lay down,
five sisters hurried to the naked mountain.

The poem goes on to explain that the sisters, fleeing for safety, never reached their destination, but were “grabbed from the arms of their family to face the guns’ muzzles.” The witnesses of their violent deaths were God, the “stunned moon,” and “the salty warm dark soil.” But “no one saved them,” Haskan writes. “None dared prevent it.”

The women, like Haskan, were Yazidis, members of a small ethnoreligious group whose traditional lands sprawl across what is today Syria, Turkey, and northwestern Iraq. Yazidis have been the target of discrimination and violence from potentates as well as from their own neighbors for centuries. Haskan’s poem is based on a Yazidi woman he knew. She helped her five sisters and partially paralyzed father into the bed of a truck as they tried to flee the advancing campaign of slaughter and enslavement against Yazidis that the Islamic State, or ISIS, began 10 years ago this month, on Aug. 3, 2014. The group besieged many of those who fled successfully for nearly two weeks atop Mount Sinjar, sacred in Yazidism, where still more succumbed to hunger and thirst. Today, Haskan suffers from depression and post-traumatic stress disorder from the psychological damage of watching from a distance as his own family fled ISIS.

Like thousands of other Yazidi Americans, he is also a Cornhusker, having settled in Nebraska after immigrating to the United States in 2016 and spending an initial stint in Washington, D.C., advocating for his community back home. He chatted with me on the phone one weekday afternoon from Lincoln, a decade after the genocide of his people that saw his own family farm destroyed. In the background, I heard the familiar suburban dad noises of the “door ajar” car ding and children’s voices over the rumble of the road. Before immigrating, Haskan had been to the United States one time, in 2012, when he had traveled as a university student with his Shakespeare club to perform at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Coming from Iraq that summer, he recalled, once he experienced the cool San Francisco rain and the slick elegance on display during a tour of the Google campus, he knew he wanted to move to the U.S. It wasn’t just the topography that attracted him, though. Before college, he was an interpreter for the U.S. Army, where he had been impressed by the diversity of the soldiers he met. They weren’t the stereotypical meatheads from the Rambo films he was able to catch growing up in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. “I saw how diverse the army was,” Haskan said. Suddenly he had Black and Asian American friends, people from all different backgrounds. “That was changing for me,” he said.