BAADRA, Iraq _ Kept as a slave by Islamic State militants, the mother prayed for her rescue and made a promise to God: If she ever saw her 10 children again, she would fast for three months to demonstrate her gratitude.
Her prayers were partially answered. In September, as the militants were being driven from their last strongholds in Iraq and Syria, she was freed and reunited with four daughters and a son. Her daylight fast has now come to an end.
But five other sons, along with her husband, are still missing.
"I honestly don't know what hope is anymore," said the woman, who asked to be identified only by her first name, Seve, so as not to endanger family members who might still be held captive. "There are very few places that haven't been liberated, and my children still aren't back."
Her family belongs to Iraq's Yazidi minority, followers of an ancient faith linked to Zoroastrianism that was targeted as heretical by the militants who overran its heartland near Mount Sinjar in August 2014.
Thousands of Yazidi men and teenage boys were killed, while more than 6,000 women and children were taken captive. Sold at slave markets or gifted between fighters, they were passed from owner to owner like chattel across Islamic State-held lands in Iraq and Syria. Girls as young as 9 were pressed into domestic and sexual servitude, and boys were indoctrinated and trained as fighters or suicide bombers.
The collapse of the militants' self-professed caliphate over the course of last year raised hopes for family reunions. But, according to a tally kept by authorities in Iraq's semiautonomous Kurdish zone, as of late December barely half of those taken captive had been freed or managed to escape.
Now that major combat operations against Islamic State have been declared over in Iraq and Syria, Yazidi activists fear that the world's attention has moved on and that the same powers they accuse of failing to avert a genocide three years ago have again forsaken their people.
"There is no one asking about the fate of more than 3,000 people," said Ahmed Khudida Burjus, deputy executive director of the U.S.-based advocacy group Yazda. "We were expecting that the international community would do more to help save our community from extinction."
Human rights activists fear that many of the missing are dead _ killed by their captors, used as suicide bombers or fighters, or caught in the crossfire as Islamic State battled local forces backed by U.S. and Russian air power. Cities such as Raqqa in Syria and Mosul in Iraq were pummeled for months, leaving neighborhoods in ruins.
But Yazidi activists _ including smugglers who have pulled off hundreds of daring rescues _ are convinced that others are still being held by Islamic State fighters or their families.
As cities came under assault, the militants often moved their families and household slaves to areas they still controlled. There were also captive Yazidis mixed in with the tens of thousands of civilians who fled the fighting.
