DAHUK, Iraq — On the morning of March 9, Samir Hassan Ali left his tent in Khanke camp, a displacement camp for Yazidis near the city of Dahuk. Samir, who worked as a volunteer teacher at a school near the camp, always came back home right after work, but not that day. When his relatives saw his tent was still empty late afternoon, they called the police. It didn’t take them long to find his phone and wallet, next to the lake in Khanke. The next day, divers found his body in the water.

It is unclear why Samir, who was loved for his optimistic character and was a popular teacher, committed suicide. His brother Haji thinks it has to do with the hopeless situation Samir found himself in. “Although Samir graduated from the physics department at the University of Mosul in 2013, he had never found a job in his field. To fill his days, he did a lot of volunteer work as a teacher," Haji said. “We have been living in a tent for almost six years. Our family is very poor."

Like many Yazidis, Samir’s family lost everything when the Islamic State (IS) attacked Sinjar in 2014. Thousands of men were murdered, 6,470 women and children were kidnapped and sold as slaves in markets in what was described by the United Nations as an "ongoing genocide" against the Yazidi minority. Almost the entire Yazidi population fled to the Kurdish region, where they ended up in displacement camps. Almost six years after IS attacked Sinjar, 360,000 of the once 550,000 Yazidis in Iraq remain internally displaced.

In addition to trauma, desperation is one of the reasons suicide rates among the Yazidis is alarmingly high, said Firaz Suleiman, a Yazidi psychologist. “People have been living in tents or in unfinished buildings for almost six years now as they cannot return to their homes in Sinjar. Many of them are depressed," he said. “Two weeks ago, a woman committed suicide in Kabarto camp, and after that I heard about another case in Germany. Basically, you hear about a case every month, sometimes even three. It is a very big problem."