Fighters for the "Islamic State" terror group are raping and torturing Sunni Arab women in areas they control in Iraq, Human Rights Watch reports. Similar abuses against Yazidi women have been well documented.
Image: Reuters/T. Al-Sudani
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Sunni Arab Muslim women and girls suffered arbitrary detentions, beatings, sexual abuse and forced marriage under "Islamic State" (IS) rule, the watchdog Human Rights Watch (HRW) reported on Monday.
New hope for Yazidi women tortured by IS fighters
A new psychological trauma institute for Yazidi women tortured by the so-called IS is being established at the university of Dohuk in Iraq. It is the first in the entire region.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/A. Martins
Hoping for help
Perwin Ali Baku escaped the Islamic State after more than two years in captivity. The 23-year-old Yazidi woman was captured together with her 3-year-old daughter. "I don't feel right," she says, sitting on a mattress on the floor of her father-in-law's small hut in a northern Iraq refugee camp. "I still can't sleep and my body is tense all the time."
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/A. Martins
Tormenting flashbacks
When Perwin hears a loud voice, she cringes at the thought of her captors. She hopes for help at the newly established institute in Iraq, part of an ambitious project funded by the German state of Baden Württemberg that has already brought 1,100 women who had escaped Islamic State captivity to Germany for psychological treatment.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/A. Martins
Kabarto refugee camp
Members of Germany's 100,000 strong Yazidi community reached out to help the women - and the Baden Württemberg state legislature approved a €95-million program ($106 million) over three years to bring women abused by the IS to Germany. Now, help is on the way on-site in Iraq.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/A. Martins
No trauma treatment - yet
As fighting rages between Iraqi forces and the IS in Mosul only about 75 km from Dohuk, the number of victims that make it to freedom increases daily. 26 psychiatrists work in the semi-autonomous Kurdish region of northern Iraq with its population of 5.5 million and more than 1.5 million refugees and internally
displaced people. None specialize in treating trauma.
Hope on the horizon
German trauma specialist Jan Kizilhan, who has Yazidi roots but immigrated to Germany at the age of 6, is the driving force behind the new institute. The program will train local mental health professionals to treat people like Perwin and thousands of Yazidi women, children and other Islamic State victims.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/A. Martins
Training psychotherapists
The idea is to train 30 new professionals for three years and then extend the program to other regional universities: in ten years' time, there could be more than 1,000 psychotherapists in the area. Students will receive a double master's degree in psychotherapy and psychotraumatology according to German standards, and training from both local and German professors.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/A. Martins
Duty to help
Kizilhan has interviewed thousands of women in refugee camps - and more recently, prospective students for the program's inaugural class: "We are talking about general trauma, we are talking about collective trauma and we are talking about genocide. That's the reason we have to help if we can - it's our human duty to help them."
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/A. Martins
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HRW said its researchers interviewed six women who had escaped from the town of Hawija, in northern Iraq south of Mosul. It was the first time the group had been able to document IS abuses against Sunni Arab women in Iraq.
"We hope that the international community and local authorities will do all they can to give this group of victims the support they need," deputy Middle East director for Human Rights Watch (HRW) Lama Fakih said.
One of the women interviewed, whose name was given as Hanan, told HRW she tried to escape from Hawija with her children several weeks after her husband fled. The group she was traveling with got caught by IS and she was taken to a house where she was told her husband was an apostate and that she had to marry an IS leader. When she refused, she was beaten, and then raped daily in front of her children.
HRW said experts had said Sunni Arab victims of IS gender-based violence and their families often remained silent about the abuse to avoid stigmatization or harming the woman or girl's reputation. The organization called for increased efforts to tackle the stigma around sexual violence, awareness about the best ways to support victims and more resources to provide mental health care to displaced people who had lived under IS.
IS, which claims to follow a type of Sunni Islam as it was practiced at the time of the Prophet Muhammad, proclaimed a "caliphate" in Iraq and Syria in mid-2014. Much of its territory has since been taken back by Iraqi security forces backed by an international coalition.
The group's fighters often justify the rape and enslavement of women from minority groups like the Yazidi by labeling them infidels. Many of the accounts by the Sunni Arab women mentioned that IS fighters had accused them of apostasy before abusing them.
