Magnum photographer Moises Saman first travelled to Iraq’s Sinjar district, in 2014, to document the plight of the region’s Yazidis as part of an assignment for TIME. As the Islamic State (IS) closed in on the town of Sinjar, long a hub for the Yazidi minority in the region, its inhabitants were faced with a choice between subjugation – and likely execution – and flight.
Many of those who fled took to the nearby mountains, and specifically to Mount Sinjar, a holy site for the Yazidi sect, and more prosaically a geographical feature that offered some short-lived degree of safety. Marooned on the...