These families are not making a pilgrimage. They are seeking refuge, some of the tens of thousands who fled the brutal advance of the militants from Islamic State through Yazidi towns and villages in northern Iraq last month.

At first they fled – mostly on foot – to rocky Mount Sinjar, where many died of thirst, hunger and exposure to the unrelenting elements of the Iraqi summer.

When they could endure no more, and with the Kurdish People's Protection Units or YPG providing safe passage down the mountain, they fled across the nearby Syrian border and again walked for days, crossing back into the semi-autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan region exhausted and traumatised.

Persecuted throughout the ages, Yazidis speak of 72 genocides in their nearly 6700-year history, and many say this is the 73rd.

Those who survived are now homeless, spread through the northern towns and villages of Iraqi Kurdistan, living around the temple in Lalish, in unfinished houses in the nearby town of Baadra, in tents on the side of nearby hills and in halls and other shelters in the Kurdish city of Dohuk.

Drawing on elements of Sufi Islam and Christianity as well as the Zoroastrian faith, Yazidis, a minority Kurdish group, worship all the elements, in particular the sun.

A closed society that does not allow marriage outside the faith, Yazidis believe in reincarnation and have a deep, enduring connection to nature and their land.

Lalish is considered so sacred that every visitor must remove their shoes and walk barefoot through the grounds and the temples. It is as holy as Mecca is for Muslims, says Yazidi leader Ismet Mir Tahsin, and it is now home to at least 450 families who have sought sanctuary there.

Yazidis believe God created the world under the care of seven angels, led by the Peacock Angel, or Melek Taus. Like the devil, Melek Taus fell from grace, but in Yazidi teachings, he was forgiven and his divinity restored, leading the group to be mislabelled as "devil-worshippers" and driving extremists such as Islamic State to demand they either convert to Islam or die.

There are now only an estimated 600,000 Yazidis left in Iraq, with another 100,000 mostly living in Syria, Georgia and in a large immigrant community in Germany.

This latest brutal assault, in which hundreds died and thousands are still missing, kidnapped by Islamic State, their fate unknown, has left some Yazidis questioning whether it will ever be safe for them to return to their villages or whether they should leave Iraq for good.

"We lived side by side with Arabs in our village – they were our neighbours, but now the trust has gone," says 40-year-old Farouk Pacho.

When Islamic State militants came to his village of Tal Qasab, they killed 19 members of his family and kidnapped 60, he says, sitting on the dirt floor of a half-finished building in a northern Kurdish town near Lalish.

His surviving family sit around him, dull-eyed with exhaustion, blanketed in despair. Two young boys use plastic spoons to dig up the dirt floor, while a little girl, just over a year old, tries to take her first steps in the semi-darkness of what is, for now, their home.

"We do not know what will happen in the future, we do not know any more if we will ever be safe in our homes – we are tired, we have already been through so much."

At just 18, Geni Abdullah is the oldest surviving member of her large, extended family. Standing in the ancient stone walkways of Lalish, she is surrounded by younger children. Eleven of them - brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, cousins - are now in her care.

"When the [militants] came to our village of Tal Banat, they took 57 people from my family, and since then we have had no news of them," she says.

She breaks down when I ask what she thinks happened to her family, including her parents. "I know what happened to them, but I cannot bear to say it," she sobs, drawing the children closer to her.

Others interviewed by Fairfax Media relate harrowing stories of being contacted by family members held by Islamic State, who say they are being pressured to convert to Islam.

"My daughter, who is five months pregnant and has her three-year-old daughter with her, says all the women have been separated from the men and made to stay in empty houses in Tal Afar," says 48-year-old Mohabat Ghadar. "When she contacts me, she is just crying, she cannot say very much."

By now a crowd has gathered and everyone, young and old, has a story of IS attacks on their village, a near-death experience on the mountain, an impossible journey through difficult terrain past the bodies of those who did not survive the journey.

One old man lifts his robe to reveal a prosthetic leg: "I walked up and down the mountain with this," he says, his sun-lined face grimacing at the memory.

The forced displacement of Iraq's ethnic and religious minorities, including some of the region's oldest communities, is "a tragedy of historic proportions", a recent Amnesty International report warned.

Amnesty has documented two massacres of large groups of men, and the killing of many smaller groups in the first half of August, in the villages of Kocho and Qiniyeh.

"IS is systematically and deliberately carrying out a program of ethnic cleansing in the areas under its control. This is not only destroying lives, but also causing irreparable damage to the fabric of Iraq's society, and fuelling inter-ethnic, sectarian and inter-religious tensions in the region and beyond."

Baba Chawesh, a tall holy man who is one of only a handful allowed to live at the sacred site of Lalish, says he fears the Sunni militants of Islamic State will not stop until the Yazidis have been wiped out.

The targeting of the Yazidis prompted the US to act by air-dropping food and water to those trapped on the mountain – a humanitarian intervention that soon grew into a military one, with its fighter jets carrying out more than 130 airstrikes on Islamic State positions to date.

But for now, the fate of the Yazidi community remains uncertain and the lives of thousands kidnapped by the Islamic State hangs in the balance.

"We are tired of [Islamic State militants] asking us to convert," Baba Chawesh says. "We will not convert, but unless there is real help from the US and Europe we will not survive, they will kill us all."