110 | SEPTEMBER 2019
have a child and rise through
the ranks of a City firm. But
hearing the desperate plight
of the Yazidi people in 2015
cut too close to the bone –
she requested a sabbatical
from work to deliver aid to the
Yazidi refugees hiding in the
Iraqi mountains. One day, her
aid work brought her across
the ‘Sun Ladies’, women who
signed up to fight as part of
the Kurdish resistance (and
would later feature in a Stacey
Dooley documentary). ‘I saw
their training, which involved
boxing, and spoke to their
commander,’ she recalls. ‘He
explained that learning to
fight wasn’t just about adding
to a military force, but a form
of therapy – a way that they
could release their anger.’
Indeed, one in five people
living in areas beset by conflict
have mental health conditions,
according to data from the
World Health Organization,
which suggests more help for
survivors is needed. And so the
seed of an idea was planted.
Taban returned home
galvanised and, in March 2016,
founded the Lotus Flower
Foundation with the aim of
creating spaces for refugee
women to connect, work
through trauma and learn
skills that might generate
income. By December thatpril showers drum on
the roof and a rooster
chorus crescendos in
the distance, but inside
this Portakabin, there
is quiet. An Iraqi
woman is writing on
a whiteboard in blue marker pen, her hair
wound tightly underneath a black cotton
headscarf. Next to her, a blonde woman in
a khaki T-shirt engages both arms to punch
the air, shifting her weight lightly from one
foot to the other. Her moves are being
mirrored by more than a dozen women,
who, despite watching her closely, are
mostly gathered together at the opposite
end of the cabin. All are dressed in black
tracksuit bottoms and white T-shirts
emblazoned with two words in bold, black
sans-serif type: Boxing Sisters. It’s Monday
morning in the Rwanga refugee camp near
Dohuk, in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq,
currently home to over 15,000 people; 12
of whom entered the cabin this morning,
ready for their first boxing lesson.
The idea behind the Boxing Sisters pilot
scheme is to help displaced women and girls
work through personal trauma by way of
combative boxing techniques. The women
in question are Yazidis – a religious and
ethnic minority against whom ISIS
attempted to carry out a genocide in 2014. It
was devastating; a 2017 study in the journal
Plos Medicine estimates that 9,900 Yazidis
were killed or captured in a matter of days
in August 2014 – and over two million
people have been displaced as a result of the
conflict. It’s broadly accepted that ISIS
fighters launched their attacks because they
consider Yazidis – whose faith is a mix of
Islamic, Christian and ancient Zoroastrian
traditions – to be pagans, inferior even to
Christians and Jews. According to a 2016
UN report, the crimes against those captured
were ‘some of the most horrific imaginable’,
including the rape, enslavement and
trafficking of women and girls – including
some of those now learning to fight under
the tutelage of Cathy Brown.ROLLING WITH
THE PUNCHES
A British boxing champion turned trainer
at London’s Third Space gym chain, Cathy
became involved in the project after
meeting Kurdish-born aid worker Taban
Shoresh. Taban’s own early years were
harrowing. As the daughter of a prominent
Kurdish political activist, she was arrested
and imprisoned alongside her family
aged four, and only narrowly escaped the
Kurdish genocide of 1986 before finding
safety in London. She went on to marry,Women’s Health
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