The site had been destroyed years earlier when Islamic State fighters swept across the region. The United Nations described the campaign of violence launched against them by the Islamic State in 2014 as genocide. For members of the Yazidi diaspora, the rediscovered photos provide a connection to a past that extremists tried to erase. The ceremony took place in the early 1930s in Bashiqa, a town outside Mosul that later fell under Islamic State control. “When Islamic State came to Sinjar, they destroyed shrines, homes and sacred sites,” said Nathaniel Brunt, a Canadian documentarian working with Webb.