(CNN) In August 2014, Iraqi forces and Kurdish Peshmerga fighters set out on a mission to help Yazidi people trapped on Mount Sinjar.
Food dropped from the skies and tears poured from the eyes of civilians young and old, desperate to escape the deadly grip of ISIS.
"I've been doing this job for more than 10 years," said CNN's Ivan Watson at the time. "I have never seen a situation as desperate as this, as emotionally charged as this."
Teun Voeten, who traveled to the town of Sinjar last month, shares a similar sentiment. The Dutch photographer has covered conflict and war around the globe for about 25 years, yet nothing quite compares to what he saw in the northwestern corner of Iraq.
"All of it was completely destroyed, and when I say completely, I mean completely," Voeten said. "I was really shocked. I had just not seen this before. I was thinking, 'What is going on with the human race?' "
It was in the early hours of August 3, 2014, when ISIS fighters stormed into Sinjar. They were intent on wiping out the Yazidis, a Kurdish-speaking minority group whose beliefs draw from Zoroastrianism, an ancient Persian religion, as well as Christianity and Islam.
"ISIS thinks they are entitled to exterminate another group because they don't have the same interpretation of religion," Voeten said. "It's absolutely horrifying, and I have not seen this before in any other war -- this very misplaced sense of superiority that ISIS has. And I think it's one of the most extreme forms of modern fascism we have."
The Yazidis' territory is of strategic significance to ISIS. Running through Sinjar is what's known as Highway 47, a route stretching from Mosul, Iraq -- an ISIS stronghold -- to Raqqa, Syria, the capital of the terrorist group's self-proclaimed caliphate. Via the highway, ISIS moves vital components of their organization: fighters, fuel, weapons, money.
ISIS executed Yazidi men and boys and committed acts of sexual violence and rape against women and girls, among other crimes, according to a United Nations report. (PDF)
"ISIS has committed the crime of genocide as well as multiple crimes against humanity and war crimes against the Yazidis, thousands of whom are held captive in the Syrian Arab Republic where they are subjected to almost unimaginable horrors," the report said.
More than a year later -- after an estimated 5,000 Yazidis were killed and about 500,000 were displaced -- Sinjar was liberated by Peshmerga and Yazidi fighters, along with the support of American airstrikes. But as Voeten shows us, the wrath of ISIS remains visible pretty much everywhere you look in the region today. The terrorists may be gone, but they cannot be forgotten.
Voeten says that many of the Yazidis who fled two years ago have not come back. This is because there's nothing to come back to; Sinjar is a shattered and destroyed place. And it's also because there's still no guaranteed safety; ISIS and their frontlines are only miles away.
The ISIS terror threat
People flee the scene of a terror attack at Istanbul's Ataturk airport on June 29. Turkish officials have strong evidence that ISIS leadership was involved in the planning of the attack, a senior government source told CNN. Officials believe the men -- identified by state media as being from Russia, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan -- entered Turkey from the ISIS stronghold of Raqqa in Syria, bringing with them the suicide vests and bombs used in the attack,
the source said.
The ISIS militant group -- led by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, pictured -- began as a splinter group of al Qaeda.
Its aim is to create an Islamic state, or caliphate, across Iraq and Syria. It is implementing Sharia law, rooted in eighth-century Islam, to establish a society that mirrors the region's ancient past. It is known for killing dozens of people at a time and carrying out public executions.
Kurdish Peshmerga fighters fire missiles during clashes with ISIS in Jalawla, Iraq, on June 14, 2014. That month, ISIS took control of Mosul and Tikrit, two major cities in northern Iraq.
Traffic from Mosul lines up at a checkpoint in Kalak, Iraq, on June 14, 2014. Thousands of people
fled Mosul after it was overrun by ISIS.
ISIS fighters parade down an Iraqi street in this image released by the group in July 2014.
Aziza Hamid, a 15-year-old Iraqi girl, cries for her father while she and other Yazidi people are flown to safety after a
dramatic rescue operation at Iraq's Mount Sinjar on August 11, 2014. A CNN crew
was on the flight, which took diapers, milk, water and food to the site where as many as 70,000 people were trapped by ISIS. Only a few of them were able to fly back on the helicopter with the Iraqi Air Force and Kurdish Peshmerga fighters.
On August 19, 2014, American journalist James Foley
was decapitated by ISIS militants in a video posted on YouTube. A month later, they released videos showing the executions of American journalist Steven Sotloff and British aid worker David Haines.
ISIS militants stand near the site of an airstrike near the Turkey-Syria border on October 23, 2014. The United States and several Arab nations
began bombing ISIS targets in Syria to take out the group's ability to command, train and resupply its fighters.
A Kurdish marksman stands atop a building as he looks at the destroyed Syrian town of Kobani on January 30, 2015. After four months of fighting, Peshmerga forces
liberated the city from the grip of ISIS.
Safi al-Kasasbeh, right, receives condolences from tribal leaders at his home village near Karak, Jordan, on February 4, 2015. Al-Kasasbeh's son,
Jordanian pilot Moath al-Kasasbeh, was burned alive in a video that was released by ISIS militants. Jordan is one of a handful of Middle Eastern nations taking part in the U.S.-led military coalition against ISIS.
In February 2015, British newspapers report the identity of "Jihadi John," the disguised man with a British accent who had appeared in ISIS videos executing Western hostages. The militant was identified as Mohammed Emwazi, a Kuwaiti-born Londoner. On November 12, 2015, the Pentagon announced that Emwazi was in a vehicle
hit by a drone strike. ISIS later confirmed his death.
In March 2015, ISIS released video and images of a man being thrown off a rooftop in Raqqa, Syria. In the last photograph, the man is seen face down, surrounded by a small crowd of men carrying weapons and rocks. The caption reads "stoned to death." The victim was brutally killed
because he was accused of being gay.
An Iraqi soldier searches for ISIS fighters in Tikrit on March 30, 2015. Iraqi forces
retook the city after it had been in ISIS control since June 2014.
Dead bodies lie near a beachside hotel in Sousse, Tunisia, after
a gunman opened fire on June 26, 2015. ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack, which killed at least 38 people and wounded at least 36 others, many of them Western tourists. Two U.S. officials said they believed the attack might have been inspired by ISIS but not directed by it.
ISIS also claimed responsibility for what it called a suicide bombing
at the Al-Sadiq mosque in Kuwait City on June 26, 2015. At least 27 people were killed and at least 227 were wounded, state media reported at the time. The bombing came on the same day as the attack on the Tunisian beach.
A man inspects the aftermath of a car bombing in Khan Bani Saad, Iraq, on July 18, 2015.
A suicide bomber with an ice truck, promising cheap relief from the scorching summer heat, lured more than 100 people to their deaths. ISIS claimed responsibility on Twitter.
Two women hold hands after an explosion in Suruc, Turkey, on July 20, 2015. The blast
occurred at the Amara Cultural Park, where a group was calling for help to rebuild the Syrian city of Kobani, CNN Turk reported. At least 32 people were killed and at least 100 were wounded in the bombing. Turkish authorities said they believed ISIS was involved in the explosion.
Spectators at the Stade de France in Paris run onto the soccer field after explosions were heard outside the stadium on November 13, 2015. Three teams of gun-wielding ISIS militants
hit six locations around the city, killing at least 129 people and wounding hundreds.
Law enforcement officers search a residential area in San Bernardino, California, after a
mass shooting killed at least 14 people and injured 21 on December 2, 2015.
The shooters -- Syed Rizwan Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik -- were fatally shot in a gunbattle with police hours after the initial incident. The couple supported ISIS and had been planning the attack for some time, investigators said.
Two wounded women sit in the airport in Brussels, Belgium, after two explosions rocked the facility on March 22, 2016. A subway station in the city
was also targeted in terrorist attacks that killed at least 30 people and injured hundreds more. Investigators say the suspects belonged to the same ISIS network that was behind the Paris terror attacks in November.
A boy walks past bloodstains and debris at a cafe in Balad, Iraq, that was attacked by ISIS gunmen on May 13, 2016. Twenty people were killed.
Iraqi government forces patrol in southern Falluja, Iraq, on June 10, 2016. In late June,
a senior Iraqi general announced that the battle to reclaim Falluja from ISIS had been won.
"People just don't feel comfortable," Voeten said. "You absolutely stay away from (ISIS) and you don't take any risks. I've been in a lot of war zones, and normally you can always talk your way out if you are arrested or held. But this is a different ball game."
Voeten, who has a background in architectural photography and anthropology, shot his photographs with a Hasselblad film camera. His black-and-white photo series is a documentation of destruction, where every image is rich in tone and texture.
You can sense the emptiness, the loss of life. You can feel the rubble -- jagged and sharp -- scraping underneath your feet. You don't need to see deep-red bloodstains to know the people of Sinjar have suffered.
"What I gathered from what was left, (Sinjar) must have been an amazing, beautiful town with some very old mosques, with some very old churches and very old houses, beautiful architecture," Voeten said. "Of course if you look at the war, you have people that are killed, loss of human life. But you have also destruction of the physical environment, of the cultural heritage, of the architecture."
Voeten calls his photo series "In the Ruins of Sinjar." It's a matter-of-fact title, he says, because there's no need to be poetic or literary about it -- Sinjar is in ruins.
"It's an illustration of destruction on a scale I have rarely witnessed before," he said about his work. "I don't have a political message. I don't have a political agenda. I know what is right and what is wrong. I think killing people is wrong and reducing a town to rubble is wrong."
Teun Voeten is a Dutch photojournalist represented by Panos Pictures. You can follow him on Facebook and Twitter.