Nasreen and her daughter Rohit survived the Isis siege of Yazidis on Mt Sinjar

On the third floor of an unfinished concrete-block house in Iraqi-Kurdistan, I meet Nasreen.
She rents a small room in the open foundations of a construction site in Duhok.
She thought she would be here "just a few weeks ... until the fighting stopped in Iraq", but that was four months ago.
I push back the heavy wool blanket that hangs across the door and Nasreen is standing in the middle of the room, smiling.

 

Nasreen and her daughter Rohit survived the Isis siege of Yazidis on Mt Sinjar. Photo / Jo Curri

On her hip is a bonny, five-month old baby.
"This is Rohit," she says, grinning.
"She is my first baby."
Nasreen is a Yazidi, a religious minority from Sinjar in the north-west of Iraq.

She came to Kurdistan to escape Isis who arrived in her village one hot, still night in August.
"I heard cars and then gunfire. And then an RPG hit my neighbour's house and there was a huge explosion."
Nasreen grabbed her Iraqi ID card and a blanket for Rohit and ran from the house.
"I knew it was Isis. I knew I had to run to save our lives. Everybody did. We ran towards the mountain."
Rohit was not quite three weeks old.
Nasreen and her husband were among the thousands of Yazidi who trekked for four days in the peak of summer, to reach the top of Mount Sinjar. They had no food. No water. Nothing.
It was the start of what would later become known as the Siege of Sinjar when Isis encircled thousands of Yazidi on the mountain, trapping them. There was no way down, alive.
Nasreen says the most vulnerable died in the first few days. Many were dehydrated or exhausted from the journey.

It wasn't until the third day when Nasreen's breast milk dried up, that she thought Rohit would die too.
"She was starving and dehydrated. She cried for the first two days and then she stopped crying and I couldn't wake her. That's when I began to panic because I knew she was going to die."
Her husband ventured down the mountain, out of striking distance of Isis, and found a shepherd with some milking ewes.
He milked one into an old water bottle and then took it back to Rohit. They prised her mouth open and poured in droplets of milk.
By this stage, Rohit was barely conscious.
Nasreen says she dropped a little bit of milk in her mouth every few hours and prayed.
"That was all I could do. I just prayed and prayed for my baby."
The next day her neighbour's baby died on the mountain and Nasreen says she flew into a rage, sure that Rohit would be next.
"I remember screaming at my husband. I told him 'I will not leave her. If she dies on this mountain I will stay with her body. I will never leave her. They will have to kill me too'."
It was several days into the siege and President Barack Obama, fearing a genocide, authorised the use of force against Isis at the base of the mountain. The airstrikes cleared a corridor down the mountain to let thousands of Yazidi escape but many succumbed to dehydration along the way.
Nasreen says she saw elderly people lying dead under trees and a dead baby wrapped in a blanket was left lying on the side of the road.
"It wasn't even a month old and it was lying there covered in dust. I looked away and I kept walking, but I cried and cried for that baby that day and I cried for its mother too."
Teams of doctors were waiting at the Syrian border and Rohit was given oxygen and put on a drip.
She was severely dehydrated and malnourished, and covered in a bright red rash.
"I can't believe we survived. I thank God every day."
That was four months ago now and as I look at Rohit - a happy, bouncy five-month-old - it is impossible to grasp what she has endured in her short life.
"She is a fighter," says Nasreen, smiling again.
"You all are," I say. "Every single one of you."
• Rachel Smalley is a Newstalk ZB host.