Sabaya: the shocking documentary filmed inside Syria’s notorious al-Hawl camp
In August 2014, after Islamic State (Isis) militants attacked the Sinjar district in northern Iraq, Hogir Hirori realised his calling. Although he had been living in Sweden since 1999, his home town was only about two hours’ drive from Sinjar.
“When Daesh [Isis] attacked, I realised that I could tell these stories in a really specific way,” he says, speaking via video from Stockholm. “I knew the culture and the language, and I’ve been a refugee all my life, so I had the understanding and the insights to do these documentaries very well.” Hirori had trained in media production and worked in Swedish television, but he had never before addressed an international audience. The news coming out of Sinjar changed all that.
Sabaya is the third feature documentary Hirori has made about the consequences of war in northern Iraq, and the fate of the long-persecuted Yazidi people. In 2016, The Girl Who Saved My Life told the story of Hirori’s initial return to the region to document the refugee crisis; 2017’s The Deminer was a nerve-shredding portrait of a Kurdish bomb-disposal expert. In Sabaya, Hirori embeds with a group of unfathomably brave volunteers who infiltrate the dangerous al-Hawl detention camp in Syria in the hope of rescuing some of the estimated 7,000 Yazidi girls and women who have been sex-trafficked by Isis since 2014. The sprawling facility is home to more than 62,000 people, according to recent UN estimates, 80% of whom are women and children.
“It was actually my wife [Lorin Ibrahim] who had this idea to go down to Syria to find out what happened to these women and girls,” says Hirori. Ibrahim is a reporter for Swedish radio and, like her husband, has first-hand experience of life in a conflict zone. “She was 11 years old when she fled