Argyll MP supports new Yazidi medicines launch
MP FOR Argyll and Bute Brendan O’Hara has shown his support for the Yazidi people at the launch of Missions for Medicine.
The initiative is striving to deliver medicine to two hospitals in northern Iraq that have extremely low quantities of drugs following an Isis invasion in the area.
So-called Islamic State invaded the area in 2014, and killed more than 12,000 members of the Yazidi religion, a historic Iraqi minority group.
Women and girls as young as nine were abducted and sold as sex slaves, and forced to convert to Islam.
An estimated 60,000 Yazidi people who fled when Isis invaded are now beginning to return to their homes in northern Iraq, with the two hospitals in the area extremely understaffed and with no medicine or medical supplies.
Oban woman Fiona Bennett, who is the UK secretary of global Yazidi organisation Yazda, is driving the project to provide medicine for Snuni and Sinjar hospitals and for the Yazda mobile clinic. Mr O’Hara said: ‘This is a wonderful initiative, one that is seeking to alleviate the suffering of one of the most abused and long-suffering communities on the planet. And I wish it every success.
‘I know that the Sinjar and Snuni hospitals are enduring a chronic shortage of medicines and even the most basic of painkillers are in desperately short supply. Anything therefore that we can send will be gratefully received by the doctors and nurses.’
Mr O’Hara has previously raised the plight of the Yazidi community in Westminster and has also hosted Nadia Murad, former Isis sex-slave and United Nations Ambassador.
To support the Missions for Medicine project, email Fiona Bennett on fimacb@gmail. com.