Iraq’s ghost towns: Islamic State drove people out; now a new enemy prevents his return | global development
The first thing that catches the attention of visitors who arrive in Faka, a small village in the Sinjar district of northern Iraq, is the silence. No children play in the streets. There are no stores open. Roofless houses stretch along the hillside, their walls scarred by shelling, while weeds and wild grass grow in collapsed living rooms.
A decade after the Islamic State (IS) swept through the region, war is still visible everywhere. But according to the people who returned, another enemy has quietly taken its place.
“Today, the problem is not just IS,” says Rajab Mohammed, 62, the village’s mukhtar, standing on 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 is over. The battle to save the villages from drought and neglect has only just begun and time is not on their side.
Before August 2014, about 150 families lived in Faka. As IS fighters seized the Sinjar region, residents fled as front lines advanced across northwestern Iraq. In August 2014, IS launched what the UN has recognized as a genocide against the Yazidi ethnic minority community. Thousands of people were killed and more than 6,000 people, mostly women and children, were kidnapped.
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 agriculture, increasingly precarious.
“People ask why families don’t return. The answer is simple. Where would they live? How would they make a living?” says Aqil Ridha of Qubq.
The UN has ranked the country as fifth most vulnerable to declining food and water availability and extreme heat. Iraqi authorities project that by 2050 the country’s average annual temperature will have risen 2.5°C, and an additional 24 days a year will cross extreme heat thresholds. Temperatures in Sinjar this summer have approached 50°C.
Rainfall has become increasingly erratic and summers are hotter and longer, while prolonged droughts are reducing agricultural production. The UN special representative for Iraq has warned that the country will only be able to meet 15% of its water needs by 2035 if current trends continue.
In rural areas, where agriculture remains the main source of income, 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 Tal Jado’o, Bahjat Othman Hasan walks among ruined houses that have never been rebuilt. The roads remain little more than dirt roads. The electricity is intermittent. Before the war more than 200 people lived here. Today there are barely 50 left. “People didn’t leave because they wanted to,” he says. “They left because they couldn’t live here anymore.”
- Clockwise from top left: Farmland around the village of Tal Jado’o is contaminated by landmines and unexploded ordnance; Bahjat Othman Hasan dominates Tal Jado’o; Hasan with his son at a village well, where groundwater levels are falling rapidly; dust devils have become a symbol of a changing climate; A cave supposedly used by IS fighters.
Parts of the surrounding countryside are still contaminated by unexploded ordnance left after the expulsion of IS. But the biggest concern now lies below the surface, where groundwater levels continue to fall each year. “Years ago you could reach the water at about 10 meters,” says Hasan. “Nowadays you have to drill up to about 25 meters. Every year it becomes more expensive.”
Not far from Tal Jado’o, the village of Al-Sajea shows what happens once that turning point is passed. Before the war 37 families lived here. Today, the 24 houses still standing are badly damaged, their rooms and courtyards overrun by hurfeish, the thorny, purple-flowered wild milk thistle that has colonized abandoned fields and ruins throughout the region. Nobody lives here anymore.
“They all went to Tal Afar [a city in northern Iraq]” says Asef Hasan Ali, 43, one of the few people still returning. He lives in Tal Afar, but during the agricultural season he stays in a caravan parked on the outskirts of the village, near the fields where he still works. “For the families, it’s impossible: everything was bombed, no one can live here.”
Just a few days before our visit, Smain, 19, from Qazal Quyu village, says his family’s orchard burned to the ground after a swirl of dust hit neighboring fields, causing an electrical spark that ignited dry vegetation. These rapidly spinning columns of hot air, common during Iraq’s increasingly intense summers, have become another symbol of a changing climate.
Villages are not only losing people, but also a generation. Village schools have fewer students every year. Those who complete secondary education rarely return after college. Others head straight for construction jobs in the cities of Mosul or Erbil, where salaries, while modest, are more reliable than those in agriculture.
“Almost all my friends want to leave. Sometimes I want to leave too. But if I leave, who will help my parents?” says Smain.
