Ibrahim, who fled Saddam Hussein’s Iraq with her family when she was three, says the circumstances
endured by the Yazidi community living in camps was “dire” – explaining they are in desperate need of
both basic amenities and mental health support. “The Yazidi people are being failed by the international
community,” she says. “They want the Yazidis back in Sinjar because they do not want them in their
countries as refugees. Yazidis don’t have a voice. There is no justice for our people.”
She says members of the Yazidi community often get messages from family members that their children are
in al-Hol camp – a locked desert camp in northeast Syria where more than 11,000 foreign women and
children related to Isis suspects are being held. Human Rights Watch has described the conditions there as
“deadly” and “appalling” and found overflowing latrines, sewage seeping into tattered tents, and inhabitants
of the camp drinking wash water from tanks which contained worms.
Ibrahim says Yazidi representatives go into al-Hol and other camps to look for Yazidis but many are scared
to identify themselves due to being among Isis fighters and in fear of “endangering their own life”.
Women have to choose between living a life of utter stigma or a life of utter isolation. As a rape victim, you
carry this enormous burden of stigma but if the rapist is Isis this is even more so
Brita Fernandez Schmidt, executive director of Women for Women International UK, who has been
involved in efforts to help Yazidi women, raised alarm bells about the plight suffered by Yazidi women with
babies born to Isis fighters. “They saw them as being tainted by the devil,” she says. “A lot of women who
were raped by Isis find it hard to find partners. A psychologist told me about a rare instance where a young
Yazidi man married a girl knowing she was raped. For him, it didn’t matter.
“Many of these women will have children – they are called the ‘children of Isis’ – which is damaging. Just
think for a moment what that does to those children. Women have to choose between living a life of utter
stigma or a life of utter isolation. As a rape victim, you carry this enormous burden of stigma but if the rapist
is Isis this is even more so. One government official said the only solution is repatriation to a third country
because they can’t go back to the original community and can’t stay where they are not safe.”
The campaigner says the only way you can be deemed to be Yazidi is if both of your parents are Yazidi. She
visited Khanke camp in Dohuk in the Kurdish region of Iraq in April.
She says: “Those 16,000 people who live there are Yazidi. It was the worst place I have been to. There were
five to 10 people in one tent. There is no running water. There are many children. They have been there for
five years. A psychologist there told me she feels like she is ‘drowning in an ocean of pain’. You can see that
level of trauma in the camp.
“They want to go back to Sinjar but they don’t know if they ever will because it was so badly destroyed.
Even though Isis has left, houses and infrastructure have been destroyed. It felt like they were trapped in
refugee camps with nowhere else to go.”
A 2016 report by the United Nations said Isis subjected the Yazidi population – which has already survived
centuries of persecution – to “some of the most horrific crimes imaginable”.
They organised slave markets. They brought the girls from one location to another and resold them again
and again. One Yazidi girl’s best friend was beheaded by Isis in front of her