The day Nazhad Salh's daughter-in-law was kidnapped by Islamic State, the 65-year-old was in her kitchen in the village of Hajj Ali, stirring six vats of thick, heavy yoghurt with a hand-carved wooden spoon. Dusk was approaching, and a thick beam of light shone through the window, turning the curds a warm, creamy colour.
This was Nazhad's space; a sunlit sanctuary where her grandchildren would sit cross-legged on thin, cotton-covered foam mattresses stacked up in the corner, and her adult sons would dart in to tear corners off the freshly baked flatbreads - sure to be chased off with a slap and a shout. As a woman, it was also the only room where she felt she had any power.
It was about 6pm when a scream cut the silence.
Islamic State militants "had attacked our village twice before, so I knew in my stomach that they were here again", Nazhad recalled, her voice taut with tension. "But this time it felt different. There was more anger. The gunshots were louder and the screams were closer. When I heard my daughter-in-law's name, I didn't stop to think."
Forgetting the deeply ingrained patriarchal protocol of waiting for her husband to tell her what to do, she grabbed the farm rifle resting by the front door - rusted and old, bound with wrinkled black duct tape - and stormed down the hill, strands of white hair escaping her hijab.
By the time Nazhad reached the scene of the shouting, Shaima, 32, was being dragged towards a convoy of heavily armed vehicles - her five children, aged two to 11, pushed along behind her, gun barrels pressed against the small of their backs as they sobbed.Without pausing for breath, Nazhad hurled herself forwards. Incredulous at her nerve, the fighters baulked.
"My mother literally chased after them and yelled at them to give the children back - while my father did nothing to help," said her son Sharid, 25, reciting events he didn't witness, but which have gone down as rural legend in the year and a half since.
'This old lady just standing in the road'
"The terrorists didn't know what was happening - this old lady just standing in the middle of the road, telling them off. In the end, they allowed three of the children to stay because she was creating so much noise. If she hadn't acted the way she did, our whole family would have been lost."
Sharid speaks with pride, but Nazhad's face contorts with grief as she speaks - her failure to save all five of her grandchildren and her daughter-in-law etched into every expression. "I took the three who needed me the most," she said.
"The youngest girl, Niam, was only two, so I left her with her mother. And Ahlam was 11. She was the eldest, and the strongest. But I fear for her the most. Islamic State fighters marry any girl over the age of 10."
It's been 18 months since that day, and nobody in the community has heard from Ahlam, Niam or Shaima since.
But now Nazhad's guilt is leading her to unforeseen extremes to protect the villagers who so far remain safe - creating her own all-female guard of rifle-armed grandmothers who keep watch over the families after nightfall.
Home to approximately 300 families, the farming village of Hajj Ali is perched on the banks of the north-eastern side of Iraqi Kurdistan's river Tigris, just an hour's drive from Islamic State-occupied Mosul, where a large-scale military operation dating back to October last year appears to be nearing its final stages.
Yet despite the region's supposed liberation, there is a terrorist stronghold less than 2km away. Climb the two flights of steps to Nazhad's rooftop and you can still see its black flag hanging loose on the horizon.
"We're supposed to be safe here, but we know that we're not," said Nazhad's best friend and fellow "night watch-woman" Safia Halifa, 80, clutching the AK47 she found in a store cupboard eight months ago...