how the yazidi women are fighting back
Last week, 25-year-old Yazidi girl Nadia Murad won the Nobel Peace Prize for raising awareness of sexual violence being used as a weapon of war. She did so by speaking up about how she was held as a sex slave and raped by members of terrorist group ISIS.
The Rwanga refugee camp in the Kurdistan region of Iraq is full of girls like Murad. It’s home to almost 3,000 Yazidi families and, while not every girl here suffered sexual violence, all had to flee for their lives when ISIS attacked their hometown in August 2014.
Today, in a room on one corner of the camp, a group of young girls are gathered, chatting excitedly. They are here to take part in Boxing Sisters, a scheme launched this month by Lotus Flower, a charity that works with women and girls affected by conflict. The Yazidis have ditched their traditional dress and headscarves in favour of training gear and boxing gloves and are limbering up.
‘Boxing is not just a great physical activity, it’s also really good for mental health,’ says Taban Shoresh, Lotus Flower founder. ‘These girls all have very traumatic stories to tell. It’s an opportunity to channel their emotions.’
Among the girls is petite 22-year-old Ghazal who hid in the mountains when ISIS came. Also, there’s Hazna, a 17-year-old Yazidi orphan, as well as 15-year-old Hayat who witnessed her grandmother die as they all ran for their lives. And there are more tales of unimaginable atrocities among the girls oin the camp. There is one girl, Zina, who tells us ISIS came when she was 14 and took her and her sister into captivity. When her sister refused to perform the sexual acts required they burned her and threw her dead body in the street. ‘Then they sold me on to four different men who all raped me violently,’ says Zina. ‘They drugged me so I couldn’t defend myself and they tortured me for a month when I tried to escape.’
Boxing has helped the girls in many ways. ‘I love the way boxing relaxes me. Afterwards,
we can now f ight back and defend ourselves hayat
I always go home with a clear mind,’ says Hayat. ‘I also feel that if we are well-trained, if anything happens to us again, we can fight back and defend ourselves. ISIS came with guns so there was little we could do, but in the future the situation may be different.’
Lotus Flower is serious in its intent. As the girls wrap cloth around their knuckles and pull on protective headgear, it’s clear this isn’t just a boxercise class. Taban has enlisted former pro British boxer Cathy Brown, who runs Boxology, an academy that trains boxing coaches. She will visit the camp and teach the girls to become trainers themselves.
If funding allows, Taban has plans to roll the scheme out to other camps. This would mean Hazna travelling around the region, earning money as a coach – something that may earn her a ticket out of the camp.
When Murad received her Nobel Prize she declared, ‘I share this award with all Yazidis, with all the Iraqis, Kurds and the minorities and all survivors of sexual violence around the world.’ The Yazidis are a community of around 400,000 people and it is estimated that around 3,000 of them were sold into sex slavery in an ISIS campaign now described as genocide. ‘If you look into the eyes of some of these girls when they are hitting each other you sometimes see something else,’ says Vian Ahmed, Lotus Flower regional manager. ‘It’s like they are imagining an ISIS member in front of them and they are getting revenge. They are different from other boxers. They have something that is pushing them to fight. www.thelotusflower.org/donateboxingsisters