Yazidi woman collapses after meeting rapist on Iraqi TV

AN IRAQI television network has been criticised after it brought a Yazidi woman face-to-face with the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil) fighter who raped her in an encounter which ended with the young woman collapsing in front of the camera.

Ashwaq Haji Hamid was 14 when she and thousands of other Yazidi girls were kidnapped from their homes on Mount Sinjar in Iraq by Isil fighters in 2014. She was given to a jihadist named Mohammed Rashid, who handcuffed and raped her repeatedly.

Ms Hamid and other women escaped by drugging their captors and she ultimately fled to Germany and sought asylum. But her rapist also reached Germany and she ran into him in a horrifying chance encounter on the street in Stuttgart in 2018.

The pair were brought together once again last month for a special news report on al-iraqiya television. Rashid, now in prison in Iraq, was brought in front of Ms Hamid in handcuffs and a prison jumpsuit and forced to listen to the pain he caused her.

“You destroyed my life. You robbed me of all my dreams,” the 19-year-old told him, repeatedly demanding that he look her in the eye. “Look up. Do you have feelings? Do you have honour? I was 14 years’ old, as old as your daughter, your son, or your sister.”

The footage ended with Ms Hamid collapsing at Rashid’s feet, drawing criticism from trauma experts who warned that such staged confrontations have the potential to reopen the deep wounds of victims.

“They cared about ratings of the show more than her,” Dr Jan Ilhan Kizilhan, a Kurdish-german psychologist who works with Yazidis suffering from trauma, told The Daily Telegraph.

Nibras Khudaida, a Yazidi activist now living in the US said: “It’s shame that the Iraqi TV show invited the rapist and the Yazidi girl to meet for the first time on TV. She is clearly not recovered yet. When will the men understand how to treat these women?”

Stacey Dooley, the BBC journalist, was criticised after she staged a similar encounter between a Yazidi woman and an Isil commander in captivity in Iraq. During the interview, the commander claimed to have raped more than 200 women.