But even as Mr. Eesa settles into a routine in Middle America, his mind is never far from Iraq, which he fled last year as the Islamic State advanced. Using Facebook, he still checks in regularly with friends and relatives overseas. Too often, the accounts are grim.

“I have to know,” Mr. Eesa said. “I think about them every day.”

So does Gulie Khalaf, who left her job as a teacher here last year and helped start Yezidis International, a nonprofit in Lincoln that works to assist Yazidis around the world. (The group uses an alternate spelling for the religion that is favored by many of its adherents.) Ms. Khalaf spends many evenings in Facebook chats with Yazidis in refugee camps, where her organization hopes to establish more educational programs.

“We’re lucky to be here,” said Ms. Khalaf, who was raised in a refugee camp in Syria in the 1980s and moved to the United States as a teenager. “We have a chance to speak for the people back home.”

There had been longstanding tensions between Yazidis, who practice an ancient faith that includes a belief in reincarnation, and larger religious groups. But no persecution from the recent past compared with what happened in August 2014 at the hands of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL.

ISIS, whose attacks on ethnic and religious groups have been characterized by the United Nations human rights office as possible genocide, cornered Yazidis on a remote mountain without provisions. Many Yazidis were executed or raped, and President Obama was prompted to authorize airstrikes and humanitarian aid. Many Yazidis ended up in refugee camps in the Middle East, where they have found relative safety but limited opportunity.

Ms. Khalaf understands their predicament. She said her family fled Iraq in the 1980s, before she was born, during that country’s war with Iran. The family returned briefly, but then left again during the Persian Gulf war.

Ms. Khalaf moved from place to place as a child, eventually going from refugee camps to Atlanta and then Buffalo, where she and her family were among a handful of Yazidis. After college, she came to Lincoln to be part of a larger Yazidi community.