Nearly a decade after the defeat of "Islamic State" in Iraq, villages in the country's north are facing a new, this time silent enemy - drought caused by climate change, writes The Guardian, reports News.bg.
"Today the problem is not just "Islamic State". The problem is water. Jobs. The future," says Rajab Mohammed, 62, mayor of the village of Faka in Sinjar province, as he stands among its ruins.
Although the battle with "Islamic State" is over, the drought and neglect are just beginning, and time is not on the side of the locals. In the region, there are already more abandoned houses than inhabited ones.
Before the war began in August 2014, around 150 families lived in Faka. Then, the "Islamic State" killed thousands of members of the Yazidi community in the area, in an act the UN has described as genocide. The village of Faka and neighboring Kubk were not directly affected by the killings, but they remain devastated. Only about 20 families have returned.
The rest are settling elsewhere, largely because of the lack of reconstruction, jobs and basic services in a region where the climate crisis is making traditional rural livelihoods, including agriculture, increasingly precarious.
"People ask why families are not returning. The answer is simple. Where to live? How do they make a living?", says Aqil Rida from Qobq.
This summer, temperatures in Sinjar approached 50°C. According to forecasts by Iraqi authorities, by 2050, the average annual temperature in the country will increase by 2.5°C, and the number of days with extreme heat will increase by 24 per year.
According to the UN, Iraq is among the most affected countries in the world in terms of decreasing water and food availability and extreme heat.
Prolonged droughts reduce agricultural production, rainfall is becoming increasingly unpredictable, and summers are hotter and longer. If current trends continue, Iraq will be able to meet only 15% of its water needs by 2035, the UN special representative for the country has warned.
More than 186,000 people were displaced in Iraq due to climate change as of September 2025, according to data from the International Organization for Migration, cited by The Guardian.
In another village - Tal Jadu Bahjat - more than 200 people lived before the war. Today, only 50 remain. The houses were destroyed and have never been rebuilt. The roads are unpaved and the electricity supply is erratic.
"People did not leave because they wanted to", Bahjat Othman Hassan told the British media. "They left because they couldn't live here anymore."
The biggest concern is no longer the unexploded ordnance left after the expulsion of "Islamic State", but the water table, which continues to drop every year.
"Years ago, you could reach water at a depth of about 10 meters," says Hassan. "Today we have to drill to about 25 meters. It gets more expensive every year."
Not far from Tal Jadu, the village of Al-Sajja no longer has a single permanent resident left. Before the war, 37 families lived there. The 24 houses that survived were badly damaged, and thistle has taken over yards, ruins and fields across the region.
"Everyone has gone to Tal Afar", Assef Hassan Ali, 43, told The Guardian. He is one of the few to return to the village. He lives in Tal Afar, but during the farming season he stays in a caravan parked on the edge of the village, near the fields he still cultivates.
"It is impossible for families - everything was destroyed by bombing, no one can live here."
Recently, the garden of Smain, a resident of another village, Qazal Kuyu, was completely burned down after a spark ignited the dry vegetation.
Villages are losing not just residents, but a generation,, the British media writes. The number of students is decreasing every year, and those who graduate from high school rarely return after university.
Others go straight to construction jobs in Mosul or Erbil, where the pay, while modest, is more secure than the income from farming.
"Almost all my friends want to leave. Sometimes I want to leave too. But if I leave, who will help my parents?", says Smain.