No international body is searching for hundreds of Yazidi women and girls still held captive by the Islamist terrorists. Instead, their fates depend on a ragtag army of activists, relatives and armchair detectives.
The investigator’s eyes dart between the two photographs. In one, a young girl, maybe 10, is wearing a colorful shirt, her hair loose. In the other, a woman, her face weathered to an indeterminate age and framed by a black hijab, stares into the camera.
The first picture is among hundreds of images of young girls sent in by families desperate to find loved ones who were kidnapped years ago, when militants from the Islamic State first roared to power in Iraq and Syria. The pictures of older women come in from a variety of sources.
The woman examining the photographs has become skilled at finding the telling detail that might help confirm an identity — and lead to someone’s freedom. But she is not a professional investigator. Her name is Pari Ibrahim, and by day she is the executive director of a nonprofit in suburban Maryland.
At night, by the glow of a laptop screen, that she scours the photos, hoping to locate women taken captive as long as a decade ago.
“Sometimes, late at night, I’m working to see if this girl is someone who can be identified,” said Ms. Ibrahim, as she compared the two photographs, searching the faces for any hint — the bow of the lips, perhaps, or a telltale mole — that she might be looking at the same person.
“Ten years brings a lot of change into someone’s face and appearance,” she said. “It’s not easy.”
The missing people are all members of a religious minority, the Yazidi, who were a particular focus of the brutal campaign of terror that ISIS, also known as the Islamic State, launched in 2014. In the years that followed, according to a United Nations commission, the militants murdered, enslaved, raped and tortured at will. Some 3,100 Yazidis were killed and 6,800 kidnapped in August 2014 alone, one study estimates.
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