HAJYAWA: Families who once fled a Turkish crackdown on Kurdish rebels in the 1990s now languish in a mosque in northern Iraq after escaping from brutal militants, longing to return home.
They lived as refugees in Makhmur, a town in northern Iraq, until the Islamic State (IS) militant group, which spearheaded a militant offensive that has overrun large areas of Iraq, forced them to leave.
Hundreds of thousands of people across northern Iraq have fled violence which has seen members of minority groups face kidnapping and death, but for these Kurdish families, it is not the first time they have been displaced.
"I have suffered displacement a total of nine times in my life. I've been a refugee for 20 years," says Ramazan Mohammed Khalil, a 47-year-old father of six who lived in Makhmur alongside some 10,000 other Kurds from Turkey.
Makhmur is now a ghost town, inhabited only by fighters from the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), a nationalist militant group which less than a week ago wrested it back from IS control.
IS militants still hold positions nearby, some in villages located just around seven kilometres (four miles) away from the town.
But for now, Khalil and his family, who speak Turkish as well as Kurdish, live in this mosque in the Iraqi Kurdish town of Hajyawa, around three hours away from Makhmur.
Other refugee families are scattered in around 30 other mosques nearby, as well as in six schools.
"I was 24 years old when I fled Turkey," Khalil says.
"This month, we fled just as they (the IS) were about to attack, because we'd heard of the massacres they committed in other Kurdish areas like Sinjar," he says of a nearby area inhabited by the Yazidi religious minority that was hit by a fierce militant assault.
At the mosque in Hajyawa, women bake traditional flat bread in the courtyard, while others wash their children's clothes using taps usually reserved for people performing ablution before prayers.
The sun beats down, and many find the heat unbearable, seeking comfort instead under electric fans installed inside the prayer area.
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