Dr Nagham Hasan is an Iraqi Yazidi gynecologist who treated and helped thousands of Yazidi women victims of ISIS. She received the International Women of Courage Award by the US State Department, the SOLIDAR Silver Rose Award, the Franco–German Prize for Human Rights and the Rule of Law amongst other distinctions. She is the founder of Hope Makers, an NGO offering support and psychological aid in Iraq.

You have helped thousands of Yazidi women victims of ISIS. What has led you to become a “Human Rights doctor” as you are often described?

First of all, I’m a gynecologist, and I belong to the Yazidi community. I graduated from the medical school of Mosul in 2002 and I have been working as a physician and a gynecologist in several hospitals for a long time. I lived in Mosul until 2007, when Al-Qaeda started to kill Yazidis in the city. They started to flee to the villages around and to Kurdistan. That is when I fled with my family to Kurdistan. I then worked at Shikshan General Hospital.

In 2014, when ISIS attacked Sinjar, many people escaped to the mountains of Sinjar, while others sought refuge in the mountains of Kurdistan. Many were captured by ISIS fighters. We started to hear that ISIS isolated many women and forced them to convert to Islam. When the women refused, they were killed. As far as we know, 6,417 women were captured. ISIS invaded Bashiqa, a town mostly inhabited by Yazidis.

This is how my journey as a Human rights defender started. With Yazidi women coming to Kurdistan by foot, in the terrible heat of summer 2014, crying. They managed to escape from ISIS. I could help them because I am a woman and a Yazidi, so it was easier for them to trust me. To be able to treat them after the horrors they experienced during their captivity, I had to gain their trust, telling them not to worry since I am Yazidi too, I am like you, and I am a doctor.

Thanks to this trust I could build inside the community, I treated 1,200 women. I was also contacted by the families. Often, men would reach out to me and ask for help, telling me their wife, sister or daughter had been taken by ISIS and escaped but they were in a terrible state. Until this day, I speak regularly on the phone with many of my former patients, they call me when they have an issue, for advice or simply to talk.

Where are these women now?

We don’t have information about all of them. To this day, 2,700 women are still missing. 250,000 people are currently living in camps in rather bad conditions. These political and international conflicts are deeply affecting the area. There are no facilities in the region, which makes life extremely difficult. But France is building a hospital in Sinjar, we are very grateful for that.

With the support of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) and the UNFPA, we established the Women Survival Center in Duhok. 

There was an agreement between the KRG and the German government to welcome 1,000 women survivors in Germany. As a physician, I helped with this project, which started in 2015 and finished in 2016. The girls under 18 were allowed to go with their immediate family, their mother and their siblings under 18,  but the ones above 18 had to go alone. 

These women were given a temporary residence permit for two years, and then a permanent residence permit. They all chose to stay instead of returning to Iraq, but it has been very difficult to reunite them with their family. 

As a doctor, I don’t think it is a good idea to separate families when there is such deep trauma. The family gives them stability and protection, both needed when moving to a completely different country. Some of them were simple girls who lived their entire life in the same village and were all of a sudden brought to a big city in Europe, with a different culture, a different language - where everything was different. 

We are grateful for this project, it gave these women a chance to start a new life, but this issue remains. We aim to gather the family members in the same city, for example sisters or cousins, rather than to send them to different parts of the country. It depends on the situation of the country, but it is very important to have the family in the same place, together. For example, in this project, there were 28 or 29 persons who survived from the same massacre. They are all relatives, some are in Germany and some of them are still in Iraq and were never allowed to visit. 

How many families are still waiting to be reunited?

Not all of them can be reunited with their family or invite them, even after being granted a permanent residence permit. We still have issues gathering the different family members in one place. Some of them beg me to help them, they have no intention of staying in Germany, they simply wish to hug their sister or their daughter one more time during their lifetime.

We also have 2,000 orphans whose both parents were killed by ISIS, and were placed with other relatives. But the social, political and economical situations are terrible in the Sinjar province, and these children sometimes live in very bad conditions. With such an unsafe environment, people can not build stable lives, and cannot join their relatives outside of the country. This situation is not helping the healing process.

What kind of support do these women need?

Nowadays, what is needed is mostly psychological support. As most of the survivors live in poverty, there is also a need for economic and educational projects. The NGO I created, Hope Makers, has two centers focusing not only on psychological aid, but offering language courses, painting classes, etc. 

In addition to this, I’m working as an advocate to raise the voices of the survivors to the international community. 

Medical support is still needed, because most of them suffer from many diseases and injuries. People ask me how can they build a home in these conditions? What can I tell them? They will first have hope and trust in the international community, but soon enough, with no results in improving their physical and economical situations, they will feel abandoned. This hope and trust will be lost and it will impact their mental states.

Therefore, we must collaborate with partners and funders to organize more activities aimed at providing even greater support to the survivors. We really want to live peacefully on our land, where our grandmothers and grandfathers lived before us. The killings continue and the genocide of Yazidis was not only in August 2014, it is still ongoing. 

Could you explain what is happening at the moment in the Sinjar province? 

The situation in Sinjar isn’t good. There is a lot of conflict in the region as well as bombings by Turkey. The Iraqi government doesn’t recognised what happened to the Yazidi community as a genocide - despite of all the evidence regarding the crimes perpetrated by ISIS against them.

We established a health center in Sinjar, called Safe Future Center. Even if it was very small at the beginning, we treated a lot of cases. As we noticed a surge in the number of suicides, we opened another center in 2021. We had the community leaders coming and giving lectures to help prevent suicides, which is now a huge concern of ours. We were soon able to have doctors giving medication, training courses and workshops to other practitioners. But we need to get more help from the international community.

Since Iraq has only six hospitals focusing on mental health, how are patients treated? 

It is very difficult! It was difficult for me personally to deal with psychological cases, I was really struggling to find a way to help the patients and I was suffering from it. It is easier now, as I learnt day by day, and trained on how to handle the cases. 

Also, because I’m Yazidi myself, it is easier for the patients from my community to open up to me, which facilitates the process of helping them. I now have colleagues specialized in psychology and foreign doctors helping us.

To cite this article : Nagham Hassan, "Dr Nagham Hasan: The Yazidi genocide in Iraq did not stop in 2014, it is still ongoing", Centre français de recherche sur l'Irak, (CFRI), 13/10/2023, [online]. https://cfri-irak.com/en/article/dr-nagham-hasan-the-yazidi-genocide-in-iraq-did-not-stop-in-2014-it-is-still-ongoing-2023-10-13

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