Iraq | New hope for Yazidi women raped and tortured by IS fighters

39-year-old Gorwe stands inside the tent she shares with family members at the Sharya camp for civilians displaced by war in Iraq

It’s been less than two weeks since Perwin Ali Baku escaped the Islamic State group, after more than two years in captivity, bought and sold from fighter to fighter and carted from Iraq to Syria and then back again.

When a door slams, the 23-year-old Yazidi woman flashes back to her captors locking away her 3-year-old daughter, captured with her, to torment her. When she hears a loud voice, she cringes at the thought of them barking orders.

“I don’t feel right,” she said, sitting on a mattress on the floor of her father-in-law’s small canvas-topped Quonset hut in a northern Iraq refugee camp. “I still can’t sleep and my body is tense all the time.”

Perwin wants treatment, and is hoping to find it in a new psychological trauma institute being established at the university of Dohuk, the first in the entire region.

It’s the next phase of an ambitious project funded by the wealthy German state of Baden Wuerttemberg that brought 1,100 women who had escaped Islamic State captivity, primarily Yazidis, to Germany for psychological treatment. The medical head of that project, German psychologist Jan Kizilhan, is also the driving force behind the new institute, which opens at the end of the month.

The program will train local mental health professionals to treat people like Perwin and thousands of Yazidi women, children and other Islamic State victims. About 1,900 Yazidis have escaped the clutches of IS, but more than 3,000 other women and children are believed to still be held captive, pressed into sexual slavery and subjected to horrific abuse. As the fighting rages between Iraqi forces and IS in Mosul, only about 75 kilometers from Dohuk, the number reaching freedom increases daily.

Right now there are only 26 psychiatrists practicing in the semi-autonomous Kurdish region of northern Iraq, with a population of 5.5 million people and more than 1.5 million refugees and internally displaced people. None specializes in treating trauma.

Perwin received brief, basic counseling after being freed Dec. 30 from IS near Mosul — “they asked do you sleep well and I said no, I can’t sleep well” — but nothing else. She looks to her toddler, dressed in a red sweatsuit with her hair in pigtails held together with cherry bobbles, who popped into the tent only to beat a hasty retreat when she saw strangers.

The child has received no treatment at all.

“She’s always scared,” Perwin said. “And she’s had nothing more than cough medicine.”

Fighters from the Islamic State, also known as Daesh, swept into the Sinjar region of northern Iraq in August 2014, an area near the Syrian border that is the Yazidis’ ancestral home.

Tens of thousands of Yazidis escaped to Mount Sinjar, where they were surrounded and besieged by Islamic State militants. The U.S., Iraq, Britain, France and Australia flew in water and other supplies, until Kurdish fighters eventually opened a corridor to allow them to safety.

Casualty estimates vary widely, but the United Nations has called the Islamic State assault genocide, saying the Yazidis’ “400,000-strong community had all been displaced, captured or killed.” Of the thousands captured by IS, boys were forced to fight for the extremists, men were executed if they didn’t convert to Islam — and often executed in any case — and women and girls were sold into slavery.

Those lucky enough to escape are left with deep psychological scars and, Kizilhan, a trauma specialist and also a university professor and Mideast expert, has been working tirelessly to help them find support.

“We are talking about general trauma, we are talking about collective trauma and we are talking about genocide,” said Kizilhan, who is of Yazidi background and immigrated to Germany at age 6. “That’s the reason we have to help if we can — it’s our human duty to help them.”

The new Institute of Psychotherapy and Psychotraumatology at Dohuk University, in cooperation with Germany’s University of Tuebingen, will train 30 new professionals over three years. The hope is to extend the program to other regional universities, so that after 10 years there could be more than 1,000 psychotherapists in the region.

The first class is made up of 17 women and 13 men, Muslims, Christians and Yazidis, with backgrounds in psychology, nursing, social work and teaching.

Galavej Jaafar Mohemmad, a Kurdish native of Dohuk who was chosen for the inaugural class, already has some psychological training but said she wants more.

“Iraq has moved from one war to another war, but this time is the worst that has ever happened to humans — that’s why I want to help,” the 45-year-old said. “Even for the women who have come back from Daesh, Daesh has taken their kids, their husbands — they’re free but they don’t feel free.”

In the Sharya camp, one of about two dozen sprawling facilities for internally displaced people in the Dohuk area, 39-year-old Gorwe has just been visited by two sisters-in-law who are receiving treatment in Kizilhan’s program in Germany. Psychological treatment has helped them, but she said it “is no use” for her.

“No matter how many doctors I see, I’ll still have the same pain inside me,” said Gorwe, who asked that her last name not be used out of fear that the Islamic State would harm her relatives still in captivity.

Twenty-four of her family members were taken by the Islamic State, including herself, and only 14 — all women and children — have returned. The fate of the other 10, including her husband and four of her children, are unknown.

“I will never forget what happened to us as they were selling us and buying us and beating us, I think about it all the time,” she said. “How could you forget?” David Rising, Dohuk, AP