In Iraqi Kurdistan, Yazidi girls box their way to a new future after ISIS terror
After the 2014 ISIS genocide which left them reeling from the effects of mass abduction and rape, Yazidi refugee girls are rebuilding their lives with the help of boxing, art and music classes. Emma Loffhagen and Charline Bou Mansour report from Iraqi Kurdistan
ABOUT THIS PROJECT
Ten or so other girls form an orderly queue behind her, chatting excitedly. They take it in turns to duck and weave, dancing around one another to the steady rhythm of their boxing instructor’s shouts of “jab!”, “cross!”.
Like all the girls in the boxing class, Zhiyan is a Yazidi refugee, and has lived in Essyan camp, on the outskirts of the dusty hills of Duhok, for eight years. She was just six years old when ISIS swarmed her hometown of Sinjar, northern Iraq, in the middle of the night in August 2014. She was forced to leave everything behind and flee, along with an estimated 200,000 other members of the Yazidi religious minority.
Like tens of thousands of Yazidis, Zhiyan took refuge on Mount Sinjar with her parents and ten siblings, surviving for seven days without food or water in the searing August heat. Temperatures reached 40C, and many died of dehydration and exhaustion. That was the last time Zhiyan would ever see the place she still calls home.
“I would love to go back one day,” she tells me. “But it’s unsafe. For now, I will just live here in the camp. But Sinjar is still the place that I call home.”
It is here in the camp that Zhiyan has found her passion. In 2018, when a ground-breaking programme called Boxing Sisters was set up to help women and girls recover and rebuild from the trauma of ISIS brutality, she was one of the first to sign up.
“When I first started boxing I found it really difficult,” Zhiyan tells me, sitting in a small library established by the Lotus Flower, a charity that provides holistic education classes to women and girls uprooted by conflict. “But step by step it became easier. It has really helped to change my mindset, and my physical health. Now I can’t miss a class.”
When ISIS overran Sinjar, their fighters carried out a pre-planned mass abduction of girls for the purpose of institutionalised rape. Initially they were looking for unmarried women and girls over eight. More than 6,000 Yazidi women and girls were enslaved and transported to ISIS prisons, where they were sold as sex slaves, raped, tortured and killed.
While not all of the thousands of girls in the displacement camps in the Kurdistan region of Iraq were kidnapped or subjected to sexual violence, all of them, like Zhiyan, had to flee for their lives.
A 40-minute drive from the city of Duhok, Essyan camp is one of 21 camps for internally displaced people in Iraqi Kurdistan. Home to around 13,000 refugees, almost all of them Yazidi, it resembles a small village, with a school, hairdressers and shops selling clothes and gadgets. But even after eight years, most families still sleep in makeshift tents. Sheep and goats roam free, often followed by a giggling toddler hot on their heels.
The Lotus Flower centre is a short drive through the camp. Like its namesake, a flower that grows from the mud, the centre feels like an oasis, with classrooms in cabins centred around a brightly coloured “art garden” painted by the participants.
Forced to drop out of the small school in the camp because of difficulties in her family life, Zhiyan, whose name means ‘life’ in Kurdish, has turned to the boxing classes at the Lotus Flower as her escape, and potentially her ticket out of Essyan.
“I love sport and it has made me realise that when I’m older, I want to be a professional boxer or maybe a volleyball player.”
Her boxing coach Nathifa, herself a Yazidi refugee, has fought hard to overcome the stigma around women doing an activity like boxing within the conservative community. “I went to each of their houses and I asked their fathers: ‘why aren’t you letting your girls come to the class?’” They responded: ‘girls have nothing to do with boxing.’”
“So I said, I want to let you know that if your girls knew how to defend themselves, one ISIS fighter might not have been able to capture 10 girls at the same time.”
