EQUAL TIMES (1/7/2019)
In an art therapy session for Yazidi survivors, a girl drew a portrait of her friend who committed suicide to avoid rape while under Da’esh (the so-called Islamic State, or IS) captivity. Another one drew a butterfly because her biggest wish, she explained, was to be able to fly away.
These girls are amongst the more than 6,000 Yazidis who were kidnapped from Sinjar, in northern Iraq, in August 2014. They were enslaved and transported to Da’esh prisons and homes across Iraq and Syria. Women and girls, some as young as eight, were systematically raped, beaten, burned and tortured. Brutalised by Da’esh fighters and supporters, they were treated as goods to be sold and traded, used and abused.
On 23 March 2019, Kurdish-led forces announced the defeat of Da’esh, but the extremist group’s atrocities continue to haunt the Yazidi minority displaced in Iraqi Kurdistan. Five years after the group’s onslaught, described by the United Nations as “genocide”, Yazidi survivors are still suffering from severe trauma.
“In September 2014 we heard about three Yazidi women who came back from Da’esh captivity and committed suicide,” says psychiatrist Bayan Rasul, the co-founder of the Emma Organization, a non-profit combating gender-based violence in Iraqi Kurdistan.
As Yazidi women started fleeing their captors and arriving in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, Rasul focused all her efforts on their plight. With Emma’s co-founder Bahar Ali, she started advocating amongst governmental and religious authorities for Yazidi women to be protected, and to provide them with psychosocial support and trauma therapy.
“At that time no one had a plan to respond to the trauma. All the support was focused on relief, which was necessary, but there were no mental health programmes in Iraq. There was no psychosocial support and very few psychotherapists,” says Rasul, who specialised in treating trauma.
Read more: https://www.equaltimes.org/music-and-art-help-yazidi-genocide#.XRnA0eszbIU