"They were hard days. The Daesh fighters raped us and attacked us, took our children and our women and killed our men," Nadi said, using the Arabic name for the IS group. Her full name is being withheld to protect her identity. She held back tears as she related the story of her 15 months in captivity. "They took us to Syria for a week, converted us to Islam then brought us back to Mosul. The worst torture we experienced was in Mosul. They gathered all the girls, raped them and then distributed them to senior Daesh fighters. They took the children away," she said. Nadi was handed over to a fighter called Salam Hamdu Ubaid, who regularly beat and raped her. A month later, she was pregnant. "I felt that a Daesh criminal was in my body," she said. "I tried many times to abort the fetus but that wasn't my fate."
Shortly after giving birth she managed to contact her family, who organized a smuggler to help her escape Mosul, a city in northern Iraq that has been held by IS since June 2014. Two of her brothers, their families and two sisters are still trapped in the city. Nadi was one of an estimated 5,000 Yazidi women and girls kidnapped by IS – the largest single mass kidnap of women this century. Based on Yazidi officials' estimates, the United Nations has cited allegations that as many as 3,500 people remained in IS captivity as of October 2015. Human Rights Watch says IS's systematic abductions and rapes constitute war crimes, and may be crimes against humanity. While some of these women, like Nadi, managed to escape, reaching safety has not ended their suffering. The horrors have left many deeply traumatized, suffering both mental and physical reactions to their harrowing ordeals. Some could not live with their memories and have committed suicide.
Years of brutal dictatorship, followed by foreign invasion and ever more brutal sectarian violence have left millions of Iraqis psychologically scarred. The cumulative impact is of staggering proportions. More than 3 million Iraqis are internally displaced, with many having fled unimaginable violence. Syria, next door, hosts more than twice that figure. In northern Iraq, which hosts more than 1 million people who have fled from other parts of the country, there are just 17 psychologists and psychiatrists on the ground. The local government, U.N. agencies and nongovernmental organizations have set up a range of pyscho-social programs, but the need is vast. "These camps are more in need of psychological support than anything else, because of this pressure. Every family, if not half, three-quarters of them [still] are in the hands of Daesh," said Ruwaq Fadil, who runs programs on women's empowerment for a British charity, Amar.
Amar runs group sessions, clinics and social centers for women in the camps, along with courses in sewing, hairdressing and handicrafts. There also have health volunteers who visit people in their tented homes to provide psychological support and health education. "The idea is to take away the pressure they are living through in the camps," Fadil said. Yet a lack of understanding about psycho-social support, along with the stigma attached to rape in a largely conservative Yazidi society means that few Yazidi women actually access any sustained psycho-social support or mental health care, according to a recent report by Human Rights Watch.
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Originally Posted by Common
