Everyone has a taste that reminds them home. For 26-year-old Mariam it's dolma -- a simple dish of vegetables stuffed with spices, meat, and rice, then flavored with lemon loved by Iraqis of all faiths and ethnicities. Today, more than two years have passed since 45,000 Iraqi Assyrian Christian refugees fled their homes in the Nineveh Plain for Turkey, and Mariam has witnessed many of these desperate families without the means to make dishes, like dolma, that taste of home. "What I remember most is the happiness we felt sharing plates of dolma with our neighbors, and afterwards exchanging our stories and secrets with sweet baklava under the stars at night," she says reminiscing on what life was like in the Nineveh Plain before the invasion of ISIS in August 2014 when hunger was rare. Home was a once-diverse town just 20 miles north of Mosul in what Mariam says was 'a mini-Iraq' where every faith and ethnic community--such as Assyrians, Turkmen, Yezidis, Kurds, and Arabs--lived together. Life wasn't perfect: bombings, shootings, and kidnappings were frequent after 2003, but Assyrian Christians like Mariam did what they could to survive in their native land. "Iraqis, all of us, were better people inside and out before the war started in 2003," she says. Then two years ago, everything changed and her family had to flee. "We knew we had to go when thousands of Muslim families from Mosul came without clothes and no possessions. Every field in the entire town was full of their cars. We thought to ourselves, if the Muslims themselves are running, what will ISIS do to us Christians?" she remembers. Mariam's family heeded their warning and escaped to Turkey. "It was as if we were just going to the store, we left with only our passports," she remembers. Even today, she is haunted with nightmares of ISIS fighters overrunning her town. Today most Iraqi Assyrian Christian refugees in Turkey are still waiting for resettlement into safe third countries, like the United States, and many have experienced hunger for the first time as victims to the lack of essential services that plagues Turkey's large refugee population of 3 million. Many refugees, like Mariam, suffer from unstable access to food, labor exploitation, and poverty, and more are expected to join. An estimated 100,000 Iraqis may flee to Syria and Turkey to escape the Iraqi government and US coalition's assault aimed at removing the Islamic State from Mosul, UNHCR said on Monday. Iraqi Assyrian Christian refugees in Turkey say they feel forgotten by the US State Department and the world. Despite recent efforts by the EU to improve refugee employment and services, Turkey is overwhelmed by the largest refugee population in the world, and unable to provide sufficient protection services according to the Refugee Convention, including the rights to work, health care, and education says Human Rights Watch. It's largely an urban refugee problem: 90 percent of refugees live outside of border camps, and are cut off from basic services including access to nutritious food. Outside of the 2.7 million Syrians living under a protective status in Turkey, Iraqis make up half of all asylum applications in the country, and they receive no support from the Turkish government. Iraqi Assyrian Christian refugees say their situation is unique as they face double persecution: first, as refugees, and second, as Christians often forced to live in small villages or urban slums, where they fear revealing their faith, or even wearing crosses. Turkey's history of Christian persecution is covered in blood to this day: more than 100 years have passed without an official acknowledgment of the state-perpetrated genocides against its Armenian and Assyrian populations, who once made up one in every four citizens. Today less than 1 percent of Turkish citizens identifying as Christian. As recently as this summer, churches were attacked in towns like Malatya and Trabzon, both sites of horrific Christian hate crimes just a decade ago, in efforts to scapegoat Christians for the attempted coup in July. Jobs, or lack thereof, are also a major problem contributing to hunger. Low wages means that families have to choose between paying rent and medical bills, or putting food on the table. "Refugee families living in rural Turkey, or small cities often have no work opportunities so even though we don't make a lot of money in the factories, we still can somehow survive," Mariam says. She explains that Iraqi Assyrian Christian refugee families in small villages often are dependent on family in the diaspora to survive, and often denied aid by local Turkish Islamic organizations because of their identity as Christians. Many who do work are victim to dangerous work conditions and low pay in a country with the highest rate of industrial accidents in Europe. Undeniably, refugee labor is a backbone to the giant textile industry which accounts for nearly 7 percent of Turkey's GDP according to the Ministry of Economy. Mariam, who worked at several textile companies, says that factories were always filled with Syrians and Iraqi Assyrian Christian refugees, who ran to Turkey in hope of escaping death in cities like Aleppo and Mosul. Now many are "squeezed like lemons" with long hours, no overtime, and salaries that meet just one-third of Turkey's minimum wage to produce fast fashion for popular brands like H&M, Adidas, Nike, and Zara. In the absence of policy enforcement to protect Iraqi Assyrian Christian refugees and others, it's critical that nonprofit organizations and the global church wake up to this crisis, advocate, and assist the most vulnerable, including individuals like Mariam. The world must step up and demand political solutions to end conflicts fueling the displacement of millions in the worst refugee crisis seen since World War II, and put an end to a lack of services, faith-based persecution, and labor exploitation in Turkey which contributes to an overall unhealthy environment among its most vulnerable. No victims of ISIS, like Mariam, should ever go hungry, abused, and forgotten.