After paying nearly $100,000 in ransoms to free 10 family members, Khaled Taalou, a member of Iraq's Yazidi minority, is still working to free other missing relatives kidnapped by ISIS group fighters.
Despite his efforts, five more relatives, along with thousands of other Yazidis, remain missing after being abducted by the militants.
"We are still looking. We do not lose hope," the 49-year-old said.
In August 2014, ISIS swept over Mount Sinjar, the Kurdish-speaking minority's historic home in northern Iraq. They massacred thousands of Yazidi men, enlisted children, and seized thousands of women to be sold as militants' "wives" or reduced to sexual slavery.
ISIS considered the Yazidis, who follow a non-Muslim monotheistic faith, as heretics.
UN investigators described as genocide the atrocities carried out by ISIS.
Nineteen members of Taalou's family were abducted, including his brother and sister, along with their spouses and children.
"We borrowed money as we could, here and there, to get them out," the journalist and writer said.
Now displaced and living in Sharya, a village in Iraqi Kurdistan, after fleeing his home in Sinjar, Taalou has managed to free 10 relatives over seven years.
