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WORK TITLE: With Ash on Their Faces
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: https://www.cathyotten.com/
CITY: Erbil
STATE:
COUNTRY: Iraq
NATIONALITY: British
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Female.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Journalist. Carey Institute for Global Good, New York, NY, Logan Nonfiction Fellow, 2018. Has been a commentator on various television and radio programs; public speaker at universities and institutions.
MEMBER:Frontline Freelance Registry.
AWARDS:Grant, Rory Peck Trust, 2015.
WRITINGS
Contributor to periodicals, including the London Independent, Newsweek, Time, BBC, Vogue, Politico, Monocle, the London Telegraph, and the London Guardian.
SIDELIGHTS
Cathy Otten is a British journalist. She is largely based in Iraqi Kurdistan, where she has contributed articles to a number of periodicals, including the London Independent, Newsweek, Time, BBC, Vogue, Politico, Monocle, the London Telegraph, and the London Guardian. Otten has appeared frequently as a commentator on various television and radio programs, particularly on the subjects of ISIS and Iraqi affairs.
Otten published With Ash on Their Faces: Yezidi Women and the Islamic State in 2018. The account centers on the ISIS attack of Sinjar, where the Yezidi minority group was targeted. Thousands were forced into captivity and slavery across ISIS-held territory, with the women often being raped repeatedly. Otten focuses on the history of the region, the narratives of Yezidi women across time and catastrophes, and also the way the media framed their stories.
In an interview in Hurriyet Daily News Online, Otten talked with William Armstrong about her motivation for writing this book after having reported on the Yezidi people while working in Iraqi Kurdistan. She recalled: “I first met a Yezidi family back in early 2013. A year later I reported on the aftermath of the ISIS attack on Sinjar. But it wasn’t until the next year when a more senior colleague who had heard me talk about the stories I reported on suggested I get in touch with a publisher for a book.” Otten continued: “I had some quite strong feelings about how sensationally the issue was being reported. This was at the expense of a deeper understanding of the community and the social, tribal and political dynamics in Sinjar. I felt there was a deeper story there. I also felt that the reporting on the women tended to be quite one-dimensional. I wanted to move away from that, presenting these women as more well-rounded characters. That is hard to do as an outsider. The people you’re interviewing are very dis-empowered and vulnerable, so there are many different ethical questions too.”
In the same interview, Otten admitted that “the terrifying thing is how organized the capture of the Yezidis was and how methodical the killings were. In the stories I heard during the reporting you hear the same details over and over again from different people. There are videos circulating from the morning of the ISIS attack on Sinjar and you really get a sense of absolute chaos.”
In an interview with Lulu Garcia-Navarro in National Public Radio’s Weekend Edition Sunday, Otten discussed how she wanted to present the stories of the Yezidi women in the book. “I met a lot of women during the reporting for this book. But I think some of the stories that I really wanted to bring out in this text were the stories of how women had not only suffered and been victimized, but also resisted and shown courage and strength when they’re in ISIS captivity. So there’s a section of the book when I talk about some of the ways that women tried to escape or subvert their captivity when they were in an underground prison in Raqqa.”
Otten also spoke with Kevin Gopal in an interview in Big Issue North, where she discussed the significance of the title of her first book. Otten explained that “the title refers to the ways that women in the community tried to avoid capture and rape by ISIS by putting ash on their faces to make themselves look unattractive. This is just one of many methods of resistance Yezidi women used. Yezidi women told the same stories for hundreds of years. I was struck by the similarities to the tales of trying to survive ISIS enslavement, and I was also struck by the way that these small stories of female resistance are often not part of the historical narratives of conflict.”
Reviewing the book in the New Internationalist, Vanessa Baird noted that “some 3,000 Yezidis are still being held in captivity. Perhaps this stark, shocking book will help the world remember them.” A contributor to Kirkus Reviews pointed out that “the author’s careful account is based on significant on-the-ground reporting that often finds her in dangerous situations.” The same Kirkus Reviews contributor admitted that “Otten’s solid work deepens our understanding of a complex clash of ethnicities and religions.” Writing in the Los Angeles Review of Books Online, Ryan Boyd stated: “Though this book engages extensively with this history of storytelling as a means of promoting survival and resistance in the face of captivity, it does so without claiming that the practice is always successful. The telling of individual stories can seem to offer redemption, but it can also work to hide ongoing political failures that prevent redress and renewal and can even lead to further violence.” Boyd commented that “the awful scenes keep accumulating, and it can be tough going for a reader. But Otten’s moral imagination is embodied in her narrative style. Her prose points to these atrocities—it says this happened, look at it. For the women who have escaped ISIS (and Otten tells their stories of flight in gripping, vivid fashion) these experiences have lasting effects.” Boyd observed that the author presents her material “in the best kind of humanist journalism: lucid, transparent, grimly realistic. She is a guide who shifts readers from scene to scene, from voice to voice, from disaster to disaster. Although With Ash on Their Faces does have a temporal chronology that stretches from August 2014 to the near present, its structural logic is ultimately more fractured, episodic, looping, dreamlike. This form mimics the recurrent nature of trauma, as the testimonies she collects overlap into a horrifying texture.”
Writing in the LSE Review website, Orsola Torrisi mentioned: “Far from being a scholarly book, With Ash on Their Faces is an insightful read for anyone … with an interest in understanding today’s multi-ethnic and multi-religious Iraq. Most importantly though, it is an intense and morally needed chronicle of the Yazidis’ battle for survival, providing evidence for one of the most brutal acts of barbarity of this century and, from this, perhaps leading to something verging on accountability. Books like this are the first step towards the understanding and recognition of genocidal violence against the Yazidi community, and religious and ethnic minorities more broadly.” Reviewing the book in Hurriyet Daily News Online, Armstrong reasoned that “it is remarkable that she was able to win the confidence of many women to hear such intimate stories: “With Ash on their Faces” simply could not have been written by a male journalist.” Armstrong said that “Otten narrates the aftermath of how Sinjar fell by focusing on the stories of a number of women. The details are often distressing: A hellish cycle of buying, selling, torture and rape.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, September 1, 2017, review of With Ash on their Faces: Yezidi Women and the Islamic State.
New Internationalist, December 1, 2017, Vanessa Baird, review of With Ash on their Faces, p. 41.
ONLINE
Big Issue North, https://www.bigissuenorth.com/ (November 20, 2017), Kevin Gopal, author interview.
Cathy Otten website, https://www.cathyotten.com (June 2, 2018).
Hurriyet Daily News Online, http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/ (January 4, 2018), William Armstrong, review of With Ash on Their Faces; (January 6, 2018), William Armstrong, author interview.
Los Angeles Review of Books, https://lareviewofbooks.org/ (April 16, 2018), Ryan Boyd, review of With Ash on Their Faces.
LSE Review, http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/ (August 11, 2017), Orsola Torrisi, review of With Ash on Their Faces.
Weekend Edition Sunday, https://www.npr.org/ (November 19, 2017), Lulu Garcia-Navarro, author interview.
Cathy Otten is a British journalist and author based in Iraqi Kurdistan. Her work on the rise and fall of Isis and the genocide of Iraq's Yezidi minority has been widely praised. She's best known for her book length investigation into the enslavement of Yezidi women by Isis, With Ash On Their Faces: Yezidi Women and the Islamic State (OR books 2017), described by the The Los Angeles Review of Books as: "The best kind of humanist journalism: lucid, transparent, grimly realistic.… (N)o book has covered it better.”
Based in Iraq since 2013, Cathy writes features and magazine articles focusing on the causes of violence and social and psychological impacts of war. Cathy's a regular commentator on TV and radio and speaks about Iraq and journalism at Universities and Institutes around the world, most recently at Sheffield Hallam University in the UK. Her work has featured on CNN, NPR, the BBC, New Yorker.com and in the Guardian. In November 2017 she gave a series of lectures in Germany supported by the Heinrich Boll Foundation and the Refugee Council. She received hostile environment training via a grant from the Rory Peck Trust in 2015, combat medical training in 2014 and is a member of the Frontline Freelance Registry. In 2018, Cathy was short listed for the One World Media Awards in London and was also a Logan Nonfiction Fellow at the Carey Institute for Global Good in New York.
With Ash on Their Faces was named one of the New Internationalist's Ten Best Books of December 2017 and was listed among the Best Human Rights Books of 2017. The London School of Economics called her book "An intense and morally needed chronicle of the Yazidis’ battle for survival, providing evidence for one of the most brutal acts of barbarity of this century and, from this, perhaps leading to something verging on accountability." The Times Correspondent Anthony Loyd wrote: "Otten tells the Yazidis' remarkable story with a deft and detailed hand in this revealing account of suffering, endurance and survival. An essential read for anyone interested in the plight and resilience of one of Iraq's most persecuted minorities."
Author Q&A:
Cathy Otten
By Kevin Gopal
20 Nov 2017 1 comment
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Author Q&A: Cathy Otten
Subtitled Yezidi Women and the Islamic State, journalist Otten’s first book With Ash on Their Faces (OR Books, £13 paperback, £10 ebook) is based on extensive, sensitive interviews with the women of the minority religious sect in northern Iraq who were abducted in 2014 by ISIS and enslaved. But Otten, a Big Issue North contributor who moved from Manchester to Iraqi Kurdistan in 2013, also spoke to politicians, Kurdish fighters, the smugglers who rescued some of the women and other pivotal figures for a book that places this latest genocide against the Yezidis in the context of the hugely complex politics of the region.
How did the idea for the book come about?
The book idea came from my initial reporting on the topic for the Independent newspaper and their Sunday review magazine back when they still had a print edition. I had already met members of the Yezidi community but slowly began to realise the extent of the enslavement by ISIS, and the horror of the massacres that took place in 2014 when ISIS swept across northern and western Iraq.
From my conversations, I was obviously struck by the terror of what the women had been through, but I also felt that the way the issue was being reported was often sensationalised, focusing on the sexual violence alone at the expense of a broader depth and context for the conflict.
The Yezidis had faced 73 genocides before the ISIS assault. What did this mean when the 74th one happened?
The Yezidis have suffered many persecutions since their inception in the 12th century (although the roots of the religion are much, much older). Because the faith deviated from Islam, they were massacred and their women enslaved by successive Muslim rulers. They were also often forced to convert by Christian missionaries roaming northern Iraq, Syria and Turkey. So in many ways the Yezidis were very used to these attacks historically and the stories of these attacks became part of the mythology of the religion, which was orally transmitted.
What does the book’s title refer to?
The title refers to the ways that women in the community tried to avoid capture and rape by ISIS by putting ash on their faces to make themselves look unattractive. This is just one of many methods of resistance Yezidi women used. Yezidi women told the same stories for hundreds of years. I was struck by the similarities to the tales of trying to survive ISIS enslavement, and I was also struck by the way that these small stories of female resistance are often not part of the historical narratives of conflict.
How did you go about securing the vast number of interviews you did, not only with the Yezidi women but also military and political figures – and some of them on the frontline?
I used good contacts with friends and colleagues in the Yezidi community and spent lots of time living in Dohuk in Iraqi Kurdistan and visiting families every day for hours at a time. I would go to camps and temporary shelters and talk to people about their lives and get to know them, not just as sources but as people, and also explain as honestly as I could to them the nature of my project and make sure no one was involved who didn’t want to be.
I think this is especially important when interviewing victims of sexual violence or child survivors. Often not enough emphasis is put on agency, control and consent. Doing long interviews of this nature is gruelling and I didn’t want to further upset anyone. I tried to visit families regularly so I became a regular feature and not someone unusual. A lot of people I interviewed also want to ask me questions or berate me about British and American foreign policy, which is understandable, so we would have those chats. I didn’t want to grill anyone or make survivors of violence feel like they were on trial (true for men also), so we would have lighthearted conversations too and I tried to make sure they knew they were in control and had a choice. Still, there were some awkward conversations around concepts of shame, for example, or corruption and money with some officials.
With officials and military leaders I had to get permission and wait for appointments, often with numerous Kurdish fixers helping me. During those interviews I wasn’t so worried about being sensitive and I didn’t have as much time. This was also the process for navigating military lines, checkpoints and accessing hard to reach towns in war zones or under the control of different militia groups. I would often employ a local driver and work with Yezidi or Kurdish students or people who know the area. Being freelance makes this all really difficult, isolating and precarious.
One Yezidi girl, kidnapped along with her mother, stopped sleeping because she feared her mother would kill them both to escape their plight, such was their bleak outlook. Elsewhere Nadima’s three children were poisoned by their captors. Is there a form of justice for these people that can go anywhere near redressing such cruelty?
Well, lots of Yezidis, including women, would like to see blood revenge for their ISIS captors or those who joined or supported ISIS. No one has faith in the Iraqi criminal justice system, which is endemically corrupt and backlogged. Torture and the death penalty are used, so when we talk about justice we might have different ideas to the survivors of violence. Obviously the problem with revenge is it encourages more cycles of violence, and doesn’t address the communal and political fractures that allowed these massacres and rapes to take place in the first place. In the book I have tried to describe what events led to the violence politically and socially, although these are really hard questions.
Many Yezidis want to see international justice and trials at the International Criminal Court, but Iraq is not a signatory to the ICC and there are many other factors which complicate this, including the transnational nature of the ISIS “caliphate” and multiple nationalities of its fighters, and the difficulties of identifying perpetrators from testimonies. These debates are happening now among international law professionals, activists and governments about what justice should look like. The matter is especially important now that the caliphate is crumbling and ISIS fighters are being captured. I may differ from my Yezidi friends and colleagues here, but I think comments from US and UK officials about the benefits of killing Brit/American ISIS fighters on the battlefield are unhelpful and in the long term don’t demonstrate that justice has been properly thought about or carried out, or even that our involvement in these countries in the first place has been properly considered. I would also add that these problems in Iraq also go back to pre-2003 atrocities and debates still rage about justice there.
Reports filtered back to the kidnapped women that those who had escaped were being welcomed back by their families, rather than shunned because their rapes had brought dishonour on them. What was the impact of these reports?
This was a huge shift for the religion that in the past had cast out women or men who converted or married outside the religion. These women were forced to convert and raped, but they still thought that they would bring dishonour to their families and wouldn’t be allowed back. Honour killings have happened in the Yezidi community in the past as well as in the wider Kurdish community in Iraq where violence against women connected to shame is unfortunately very common. I don’t think all enslaved women heard these reports, but for the ones that did it galvanised them to try and take action or escape, and was a huge relief.
How will the near collapse of ISIS affect the Yezidis?
This has yet to be seen. If ISIS returns to being a guerrilla insurgent group then it could mean more danger and insecurity. The Yezidis certainly don’t feel safe living in Iraq and want to leave. Unfortunately the end of ISIS also means political disputes and fights that existed before ISIS took over large parts of Iraq are re-emerging. This is incredibly worrying for the Yezidis. They are also concerned about their radicalised youth (Yezidi boys trained to fight by ISIS) and young children and women who are lost somewhere in the caliphate.
What does the growing standoff between Iraqi and Kurdish forces following the Kurdish referendum mean for the Yezidis?
It means more insecurity, anxiety and probably more violence. In Iraq this sort of violence tends to be played out on fault lines between militia group control, and these are often the areas where minorities like the Yezidis live (there are historical reasons for this). Most Yezidis are firm in their thinking that they need to leave Iraq, even though their holy places are there. They’d like asylum in the UK or other countries, education, jobs and the chance to live safely like everyone else. But that goes for many other groups in Iraq too.
Author Interviews
< 'With Ash On Their Faces': The Story And Struggle Of The Yazidi
November 19, 20178:10 AM ET
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LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:
More than 6,000 Yezidi women and children were kidnapped, raped and enslaved under the Islamic state's control when it took over parts of Iraq. The Yezidi are an ancient minority ethnic group with deep roots in the country. In her book, "With Ash On Their Faces," Cathy Otten tells the history of the Yezidi and the personal stories of the women who faced all odds in the face of ISIS. Cathy joins us now from Manchester. Welcome to the program.
CATHY OTTEN: Thank you very much.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Tell us the story of one of the women you encountered when you were doing your reporting on this.
OTTEN: So I met a lot of women during the reporting for this book. But I think some of the stories that I really wanted to bring out in this text were the stories of how women had not only suffered and been victimized, but also resisted and shown courage and strength when they're in ISIS captivity. So there's a section of the book when I talk about some of the ways that women tried to escape or subvert their captivity when they were in an underground prison in Raqqa.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: These women were abducted from Iraq and then transported to Raqqa.
OTTEN: That's correct. In that prison, hundreds, if not thousands, of women were kept together in horrible, horrible conditions - sewage around their feet and crammed. They couldn't lie down. There was no sunlight. And I spoke to women who had done things like cut the hair of young girls that they were with to try and make them look like boys so they wouldn't be taken.
I met a woman who had sewed the names of her family and friends and their phone numbers on the inside of her underwear with a needle and thread that she'd snuck into captivity. And with the same needle, she tattooed the name of her husband, who is missing, on the inside of her arm in case she was killed, and they wanted to find her body.
What I wanted to try and understand is, when you're in circumstances of such horror, what is it that keeps you going - whether it's religion or it's love or it's children or it's hope.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: And what did they say? What makes them carry on? What were the things that they were holding precious to them in these horrible, horrible conditions?
OTTEN: Well, often, it was about their religion. So they would remember the special things that make their faith different from other faiths. They would hold on to sacred bowls of earth or bracelet. So there was a spiritual element of this survival.
It was often - like it would be for most of us, I think, it was about family and friends and the hope that a loved one was still surviving or that a child would be able to go home in the future. And these stories I found had also been told by previous generations of Yezidi women. They've been passed down from persecutions hundreds of years ago because this is not new for the Yezidi people.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: What is life like for the Yezidi women now who have escaped and are trying to reintegrate into society?
OTTEN: I think reintegration is very difficult. But the Yezidi religion has been able to adapt and change. There is a baptism ritual that is now done for women when they come home because they've been forced to convert to Islam, and they've been raped. They can do this and that marks the beginning of their re-entry into the Yezidi community. Psychologically, it's hugely important for them.
But we see the ongoing displacement of the Yezidis as a real continuation of the genocide. And, really, I don't think we can talk about recovery until they feel safe again. And I think that's the same with a lot of people - a lot of people who've become refugees that the trauma remains. It's about dealing with it. But until you feel that you're in a safe and secure place, you can't really begin to process what's happened.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: When you've spoken to these women, what do they say that they're looking for? What are their hopes now after this very traumatic period?
OTTEN: When I've spoken to Yezidi women, their hopes are usually to find their loved ones, also just to live normal lives - to be able to go to school, to send children to school, which is impossible as the displacement continues. So the priorities are to get their missing relatives back and their children, to find out what happened to loved ones but also about justice.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Yeah. You write in the introduction to your book that the idea of justice for this group looks a long way off. What would justice look like?
OTTEN: Most Yezidis that I've spoken to, they want international recognition for what happened. But the Yezidis don't tend to have a lot of faith in the Iraqi justice system. So that's why they're putting a lot of faith in the hope that some international courts or mechanisms could come together to try and give them a sense that the world is listening and that there would be some repercussions for what happened to them.
GARCIA-NAVARRO: Cathy Otten is the author of "With Ash On Their Faces." Thank you very much.
OTTEN: Thank you very much, Lulu.
January 06 2018 00:01:00
INTERVIEW: Journalist Cathy Otten on the Yezidis before and after ISIS
William Armstrong - william.armstrong@hdn.com.tr
The suffering of the Yezidis of northern Iraq hit international headlines with the rise of ISIS in 2014. Almost three years on, ISIS has seemingly been swept out of the country, leaving a trail of destruction in its wake.
“With Ash on their Faces: Yezidi Women and the Islamic State” by Arbil-based journalist Cathy Otten chronicles the persecution that the ancient religious group suffered under the ISIS jihadists. Specifically, the book (reviewed in HDN here) details the tragic experiences of thousands of Yezidi women sold into sexual slavery during ISIS’ reign of terror. The title refers to the Yezidi women’s survival tactic – learned over centuries - of smearing ash on their faces and cutting their hair to become undesirable to their captors and perhaps avoid assault.
Otten spoke to the Hürriyet Daily News about her book and the reporting she undertook to write it. The conversation has been edited for clarity and concision.
How did you come to write the book?
I was already living and working in Iraqi Kurdistan, reporting on these issues. I first met a Yezidi family back in early 2013. A year later I reported on the aftermath of the ISIS attack on Sinjar. But it wasn't until the next year when a more senior colleague who had heard me talk about the stories I reported on suggested I get in touch with a publisher for a book.
I had some quite strong feelings about how sensationally the issue was being reported. This was at the expense of a deeper understanding of the community and the social, tribal and political dynamics in Sinjar. I felt there was a deeper story there. I also felt that the reporting on the women tended to be quite one-dimensional. I wanted to move away from that, presenting these women as more well-rounded characters. That is hard to do as an outsider. The people you're interviewing are very dis-empowered and vulnerable, so there are many different ethical questions too.
Summarize for us who the Yezidis are and what has happened to them over the years, as well as what happened after ISIS emerged.
The Yezidis worship a religion with ancient roots, some say going back to the Sumerians. Certainly they are heavily influenced by pre-Zoroastrian, east Iranian, Mithraism traditions. These practices of worship around rites, sun worship and nature continued in the mountains around Iran and Iraq. The Yezidis were influenced by a 12th century Sufi mystic called Sheikh Adi who came from the Bekaa Valley in what is now Lebanon. He went to Baghdad and established a Sufi order in the mountains of northern Iraq in Lalish. That is now the Yezidi holy center, a very important place like Mecca for the Yezidis. Sheikh Adi's mystical teachings influenced the people living around Lalish at that time, so there was a kind of fusing of ancient pre-Islamic religious practices with the influence of Sufism. Over time the devotees of Sheikh Adi became more renegade in their interpretation of Islam and were cast out of the Islamic community. This renegade element meant they were repeatedly persecuted throughout their history. There are countless tales that members of the community tell - this was only an oral religion until very recently - about attacks and persecutions. The Yezidis lived for centuries on the edge of the Ottoman Empire. Sinjar Mountain was the place where they could try to escape taxation, forced conversion, and the capture of their women. Fast-forward to 2014 and Sinjar is also where they were attacked by ISIS.
How many Yezidis are there in northern Iraq and elsewhere?
I'm not sure about the exact population but it's less than a million worldwide. They are a very small group. Partly that's to do with strict marriage practices. In northern Iraq there are probably less than half a million Yezidis. There were 300,000 to 400,000 Yezidis living around Sinjar around the time of the Sinjar attack. There are also small communities in the Caucasus and there were a few in southeastern Turkey, though I don't believe there are any left. There were some Yezidis in Syria but also no longer. Now there is a large population in Germany and some in the U.S. and Australia.
They have often been targeted because of the popular belief they are devil worshipers
They worship a peacock angel, which is their demiurge or representative of God on earth. He's the chief of the seven angels, which are very important in the Yezidi creation story. There is actually a likeness in the story of the peacock angel and the Yezidis' creation myth to the devil in other religions, in Islam and Christianity. But of course for the Yezidis he is not the devil. So this is a misinterpretation that has caused a lot of strife for the community.
Although many of the attacks over the centuries were caused by Muslim rulers, Western travelers also propagated crude Orientalist stereotypes about the Yezidis being devil-worshipers. Missionaries made many attempts to convert Yezidis to Christianity, and a lot of their early accounts are full of racist stereotypes.
Much of the book is focused on the issue of an almost industrial sexual slavery system that developed after the ISIS attack on Sinjar. Talk a bit about this aspect of the book.
It was immediately obvious to the people involved that their women and girls were missing. But it took a while for people to understand the scale of what happened. It is thought to be 6,000 or maybe even more than 6,000 women and children who were taken. The U.N. has called it a genocide, saying ISIS went in there with a pre-planned intention to carry out this mass enslavement because it had vehicles and was able to transplant large numbers of Yezidis as the spoils of battle. They were initially taken to places like Baaj, south of Sinjar, and Tel Afar.
The terrifying thing is how organized the capture of the Yezidis was and how methodical the killings were. In the stories I heard during the reporting you hear the same details over and over again from different people. There are videos circulating from the morning of the ISIS attack on Sinjar and you really get a sense of absolute chaos. Lots of people didn't know what was happening. Some of the Yezidis in a town on the north side of the mountain even greeted ISIS fighters smiling and waving because they didn't know what was going on.
The women and children were taken off and basically treated like animals. Young girls were sold and locked away in houses. There was awful abuse, as you can imagine. The young and more attractive girls were sold first, sold off in auctions. Some of the older women were forced to do housework. A lot of the children have completely disappeared and some who have found their way back have completely forgotten who they are, forgetting Kurdish and instead now speaking Arabic after being trained as imams or fighters for ISIS. Some of those who have returned don't trust their parents and have this fundamental confusion about what is going on. For the men in the community there have been big shifts in Yezidi culture toward accepting the women back. But that has been really difficult for Yezidi men as it is a traditional culture with a strong sense of honor and shame.
The book is made up of more than 100 interviews with victims. How did you go about conducting those interviews?
I'd already been covering the issue as a journalist so I already knew many of the people in the community. But the scale of the project and the subject matter was really daunting. I'd never written a book before and didn't know anyone who had. So I just went straight into it. I spent probably around seven months traveling around Yezidi areas with Yezidi friends, visiting people and trying to be transparent about the aims of the project. In the camps here in Iraq sometimes Yezidis are visited by journalists and they don't quite understand that the journalist isn't there to help them like an NGO worker. So I tried to be very straight, spending time with people and getting to know them. It became clear who was comfortable speaking and who wasn't. It was a very instinctual process really. But it was also a very intense experience. I had nightmares at the time of doing the reporting.
The Yezidis are a very conservative and introspective community. And the women you spoke to are in many cases still going through trauma. As I was reading I thought that only a woman could successfully win the confidence of the subjects to report such material.
I think that's probably true. But I also think that being an outsider, a non-Yezidi, created a different barrier that made it difficult. It also had to go through translation, because although I understand a bit of Kurdish it is definitely not enough, as the Yezidis speak Kurmanji Kurdish. I was working with female Yezidi translators while doing these interviews and I think that helped. They were very smart and interesting in their own right, able to explain cultural and language idioms that I may not understand.
You talk in the book about how it wasn't clear whether the women subjected to rape and sexual abuse would be accepted back into the community. How did this aspect of inter-Yezidi communal dynamics play out?
One of the reasons why ISIS used sexual abuse was as a way to wipe out the Yezidi community, more than just by killing the men. Because the Yezidis have very strict rules about not being able to marry outside the community. In the past there was a famous case of an "honor killing" of a Yezidi girl who ran away with a Sunni Arab man. But in the ISIS case actually the Yezidi community did react quite quickly to accept back these women who were subjected to abuse.
I don't want to paint a too rosy picture. It has not been easy for any of the women and girls who have returned. Yezidis can't marry outside their religion or caste and in the diaspora some people have started talking about how this is actually causing problems. So some younger Yezidis are now saying they should relax these rules, and not just for the women who were forced to convert to Islam and suffered these terrible things.
How many Yezidis are still being held by ISIS?
I think the last figure I saw was that over 2,000 women and children are still missing. A lot of men are also still missing because a lot of the mass graves around Sinjar Mountain haven't been properly exhumed because they are on this disputed territory line, it's not safe and international organizations can't go there. It's very difficult to access Sinjar at the moment. We've recently seen clashes between the KRG and Baghdad. Even before 2014, the fact that the Yezidis lived along this disputed territory actually made them really vulnerable.
What is the current situation in Sinjar? How many Yezidis have returned since ISIS was basically driven out of Iraq?
Sinjar city itself was completely destroyed. I was never there before but by all accounts it was a very interesting, beautiful place. It was underneath Sinjar Mountain with a 4th century Roman fort, as well as Shia shrines and different types of mosques, an Armenian church, different Christian communities, Shia and Sunni Muslims, Turkmens and Arabs.
A lot of Yezidis have actually gone back to the towns around Sinjar. It has been a slow trickle based on the various military campaigns. But I've not been back for a while and now it's very difficult to get there due to this recent fighting between Baghdad and the KRG and all the tensions. Most Yezidis still don't feel safe living in Iraq and are trying to leave. I don't think I have any Yezidi friends who aren't trying to leave.
In Turkey people have been warning darkly about a second PKK headquarters potentially being set up in Sinjar. Who’s in control there?
From what I've heard it seems like there's a bit of a security vacuum. Iraq's al-Hashd - or Popular Mobilization Forces - are in control of most areas around Sinjar now. Before it was the Peshmerga. So the security dynamics keep shifting. A lot of the Yezidis who joined the PKK early on have now switched to join Yezidi groups under the al-Hashd. From conversations I've had it seems that the PKK has lost some power and influence there. Some of the PKK commanders who had been directing operations on Sinjar Mountain have gone back to Kandil. But the Sinjar area is still important for the PKK as a kind of fall-back from the Rojava enclave in Syria.
For the Yezidis the PKK was always just an alliance of convenience. Even though a number of Yezidis have been members going back, I don't think the PKK has always been a natural fit with the traditional Yezidi culture in Sinjar. They have very different views on the role of women, for example.
The Sinjar area has also always been important for smuggling. Whoever holds the border area has always been able to make a lot of money from smuggling: Whether it oil, cigarettes, sheep, or al-Qaeda fighters. That's one reason why the area is important for the PKK and other forces.
Cathy Otten is a British writer and journalist based in Iraqi Kurdistan. She writes for a range of publications including the Independent, Newsweek, BBC, TIME, Vogue, Politico, Monocle, the Guardian and the Telegraph. She is a regular commentator on TV and radio, talking about Iraq and the war with ISIS.
With Ash on their Faces--Yezidi Women and the Islamic State
Vanessa Baird
New Internationalist. .508 (Dec. 2017): p41.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 New Internationalist
http://www.newint.org
Full Text:
With Ash on their Faces--Yezidi Women and the Islamic State by Cathy Otten (OR Books, ISBN 978-1-682191-08-8)
The world woke up to the plight of Iraq's Yezidi community in August 2014, when an estimated 130,000 people were left stranded on Sinjar Mountain after fleeing ISIS. Over the next fortnight, most of them managed to escape across the desert to Syria, thanks to a rescue mission undertaken by troops from the Kurdistan Workers' Party and Syria's People's Protection Units. The world watched, sighed in relief and promptly forgot.
But this is a community that has experienced 74 genocides in its history, and whose future remains uncertain. Author Cathy Otten, who is based in Iraqi Kurdistan, conducted more than 100 interviews to piece together the harrowing truth of the ISIS attack and its aftermath, focusing in particular on the 6,000 Yezidis --mainly women and children--who were enslaved and transported to prisons, military training camps and the homes of ISIS fighters, where they were raped, beaten and starved.
Otten argues that, despite the mainstream media stereotyping of Yezidi women as passive victims, they were able to draw on their religious beliefs and oral traditions to find the strength to fight back --including by rubbing dirt into their faces to make themselves less desirable to their captors.
The women interviewed by Otten express deep anger and a thirst for revenge yet, despite broken bodies and hearts, their pride, courage and sense of identity have remained intact. And they are the 'lucky' ones--some 3,000 Yezidis are still being held in captivity. Perhaps this stark, shocking book will help the world remember them.
JL *** orbooks.com
STAR RATING
***** EXCELLENT **** VERY GOOD *** GOOD ** FAIR * POOR
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Baird, Vanessa. "With Ash on their Faces--Yezidi Women and the Islamic State." New Internationalist, Dec. 2017, p. 41. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A517440829/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=db2c4f77. Accessed 16 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A517440829
Otten, Cathy: WITH ASH ON THEIR FACES
Kirkus Reviews. (Sept. 1, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Otten, Cathy WITH ASH ON THEIR FACES OR Books (Adult Nonfiction) $17.00 10, 24 ISBN: 978-1-682191-08-8
Harrowing history of an often overlooked, often targeted group in the ongoing struggle between Islamic State militants and other forces in the Middle East.It is an irony of sorts that the Yezidis, who live in the Iraqi highlands in territory contested among Kurds, Arabs, and other actors, were safer during the regime of Saddam Hussein than in the years since the American invasion. Not that circumstances were ideal then; observes Otten, a British journalist who has been working in Kurdistan for the last few years, some Yezidi communities had been forcibly resettled during the Hussein years. But then came "economic meltdown under UN sanctions, the breakdown of the state and security after the US-led invasion of 2003, and political failures that followed," onto which a long siege by the Islamic State group and the wholesale rape and enslavement of other communities layered additional injuries. As the author writes, the Yezidis are Islamist targets for religious reasons; the Islamic State "describes the Yezidis as pagans and devil worshippers who are not entitled to pay a tax and live in the caliphate," less desirable even than Christians and scarcely human. By Otten's account, the Yezidis have been fighting back, though they are not well-served by infighting among various Peshmerga and other anti-IS forces in Kurdistan, and they thus "remain unable to define their future militarily or politically, as many, if not most, would prefer." The author's careful account is based on significant on-the-ground reporting that often finds her in dangerous situations--e.g., hunched down on a rooftop with fighters trying to take back a Yezidi city from IS occupiers, in the field with young warriors, even children, who are not easily distinguished from the adults fighting all around them. Of some cause for optimism are the Yezidis' efforts to reintegrate the women who were stolen away, one of whom meaningfully says, "even if we marry or fall in love there will still be this thing inside that is broken." Otten's solid work deepens our understanding of a complex clash of ethnicities and religions.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Otten, Cathy: WITH ASH ON THEIR FACES." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Sept. 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A502192387/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=4559724c. Accessed 16 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A502192387
“Living in the Shadows of the Dead”: Cathy Otten’s “With Ash on Their Faces”
By Ryan Boyd
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APRIL 16, 2018
IN THE SUMMER of 2014 — August, the sun hammering all day on prickly wheat fields — the first Islamic State fighters arrived in Sinjar province, close to the Syrian border in northwest Iraq.
Bearded and mostly young, lugging an array of weapons, they came in pickup trucks and cars, as well as Humvees captured from the Iraqi Army in earlier battles. Soon the black-and-white flag of ISIS, the freshest desert nightmare, would fly along roads and atop buildings in places that rarely (or never) make it onto American television: Tel Azer, Kojo, Siba Sheikheder, Tel Banat, Sinjar City. This last place was home of the Yezidis, a religious minority long accustomed to violent persecution.
The confrontation would have terrible consequences for this already embattled and vulnerable population, and no book has covered it better than Cathy Otten’s With Ash on Their Faces: Yezidi Women and the Islamic State. Otten has been doing lonely work for half a decade now, covering a corner of the world most Westerners have stopped thinking about, if they ever did in the first place. Her book, stitching together individual accounts of displacement and trauma, is the chronicle of a staggering tragedy.
The Yezidi faith is rooted in an oral poetics. Centered around a place called Lalish, where a revered 12th-century Sufi mystic named Sheikh Adi ibn Musafir is buried, their religion is inextricable from significant stories and hymns, linguistic structures passed down through community networks; their understanding of the universe is located not in texts but in spoken narrative and song, particularly those associated with sacred shrines. Yezidism is a monotheistic religion that incorporates elements of pre-Islamic Mesopotamian belief systems; they conceive of their god’s earthly representative as Melek Taus, an angel who takes the form of a peacock. Most speak Kurdish and many identify ethnically as Kurds, but some speak Arabic.
You cannot become a Yezidi. You must be born one. This accounts for the small size of their population, which is under a million globally, with half of those in northern Iraq. Most of the rest are scattered in a diaspora that stretches from Syria to Germany to Texas.
They have endured a staggering 74 genocides in their history, and they remember all of it through oral tradition. Early Muslim rulers considered them devil-worshipping infidels. The Ottomans were especially vicious, massacring hundreds at a time, ransacking villages, and forcing mass conversions to Islam. Saddam Hussein did not spare them his psychotic, industrial violence: after many Yezidis joined the Kurds in uprisings during the 1970s, Saddam responded by razing their villages and relocating survivors to grim concrete towns built by the state, where they were forbidden from speaking Kurdish and forced to register their ethnicity as Arab.
In the 1990s, US sanctions crippled the regional and national economies in which Yezidi communities were tangled, leaving many in poverty. Then came the 2003 American-led invasion and the disasters in its wake.
In response to this deep history of violence and dispossession, Yezidism developed its talking historiography, its poetic defenses. Adherents remember the genocides this way, recording what the German-Yezidi psychologist Jan Kizilhan calls “trans-generational trauma.” But their traditions are more than just an archive of sorrow; they also tell of resistance against evil, of dignified but tenuous lives. There is no Yezidism without these stories. Crucially, they are often relayed by women.
After the initial shock-and-awe of the 2003 invasion, which killed thousands of Iraqis and destroyed the Ba’athist regime, the region collapsed into a civil war of ghastly territorial and ethnic violence. Disaster came in waves. Throughout the mid-2000s, hundreds of Yezidi families were driven from the city of Mosul, which had long hosted a significant Yezidi community. Islamic extremists would have killed them if they had remained, so they fled to Kurdistan, a semi-autonomous region to which they already had close cultural, political, and security ties. In the summer of 2007, terrorists detonated four enormous truck bombs in the heavily Yezidi towns of Siba Sheikheder and Tel Azer, killing hundreds and wounding thousands, the deadliest single bombing of the entire post-2003 war. Many Yezidis joined militias during this time, especially the vaunted Peshmerga, whose name comes from the Kurdish for “those who face death.”
Incubated in American military prisons and initially allied with al-Qaeda, ISIS officially went independent in 2013 and set about working on its goal: establishing a radical caliphate across the Middle East. This was bleak news for the region’s Christians, Jews, and Shia Muslims, given that the Islamic State considers only its version of Sunni Islam legitimate. But the Yezidis were in even greater danger. Unlike Christians, whom ISIS considers “people of the book” and thus hypothetically worthy of life, the Yezidis are seen as barbarians. Their lives have no value beyond two brutal functions: butchering their men makes for vivid propaganda in a hyper-mediated century, and enslaving their women gratifies ISIS soldiers while also, as a tangential benefit, humiliating the remnants of an entire people.
With the weak, splintered Iraqi central regime unable to maintain stability across wide swaths of the country, and with the Syrian Civil War burning the world to the west, Islamic State’s power ballooned. ISIS fighters easily overcame the feeble Iraqi Army, taking much of its American-supplied heavy weaponry and capturing Mosul in mid-June 2014. Weeks later, as a holiday consecrated to the Yezidi prophet Sheikh Adi came to a close, as Yezidis broke their fasts, slaughtering sheep and exchanging gifts and gathering to chat with neighbors in the cool of the evening, ISIS was moving toward them. At least 130,000 people fled to a nearby place that had been a Yezidi redoubt for centuries: Sinjar Mountain.
No safety awaited. Over the coming weeks 3,000 Yezidis would be killed by ISIS, half during the initial rush away from the burning towns, and half dying of wounds, dehydration, and starvation as Islamic State laid siege to the hills. On August 7, Barack Obama appeared on television to announce that the United States would begin airstrikes on ISIS positions around Sinjar Mountain; American aircraft also dropped food and water, though not nearly enough for 130,000 people. At the same time Kurdish militias began fighting to retake the mountain, and they cut a road through to Syria after two weeks of grisly fighting. By the time US special forces arrived in Sinjar, most of the Yezidis had escaped under the protection of Kurdish fighters. But ISIS took nearly 6,400 Yezidi prisoners, most of them women and children. Awaiting these captives were slave markets, torture chambers, and underground prisons across Iraq and Syria.
Yezidi women were already a vulnerable population, because their patriarchal society emphasizes female chastity and purity and invests much less in educating girls than boys. (Many Yezidi women are illiterate.) Missteps, such as attempting to marry outside the faith, are often punished violently; “honor killings” are not uncommon. Such vulnerability is intersectional: as Otten has it, Yezidi women “become doubly victimized, as women in a male-dominated society, and as part of a religious minority.”
In other words, ISIS tortured them for being women and for being Yezidi. The terrorists developed “a whole theory of property,” Otten remarks, whereby “mass abduction for the purpose of institutionalized rape” simultaneously functions as a weapon of war (a way to humiliate and debase whole communities) and constitutes a complex market in human flesh. Men would be killed. Women would be commodified.
The story of these women is the center of With Ash on Their Faces, and because the text is based primarily on first-person testimony, it participates in the Yezidi tradition of memory, endurance, and recovery. If, to use Teju Cole’s terminology, actual warfare is hot violence, then cold violence entails a failure of language — what Otten calls “the violence of indignity, of forgetting, of carelessness and of not listening.” Blend the two and you have the conditions for genocide. Otten is not sentimental, refusing to treat narrative as a magic elixir. Language has limits:
Though this book engages extensively with this history of storytelling as a means of promoting survival and resistance in the face of captivity, it does so without claiming that the practice is always successful. The telling of individual stories can seem to offer redemption, but it can also work to hide ongoing political failures that prevent redress and renewal and can even lead to further violence.
Or as a former ISIS prisoner puts it, “If anyone comes and asks, I will tell them what happened to me; but no one can bring back the dead.”
ISIS developed a rigorous system for it all. Prisoners were given “slave numbers” to organize things, then offered to bidders. Single women, assumed to be virgins, were most salable, sliding quickly through the churn of bodies and dispersing across Syria and Iraq, wherever ISIS held territory. At a former refinery, for instance, women and girls were chained to the walls, then beaten and raped by multiple men. Their jailers used forced contraception to prevent inconvenient biological developments. “It costs more for one with blue eyes,” remarks one rapist; “Check her teeth,” advises another.
Lest we think that radical Islam rejects neoliberalism altogether, ISIS developed a mobile-phone app to expedite the slave trade and held computerized lotteries for the most beautiful captives. One prisoner observed that the ISIS men selected human beings “as if they were buying vehicles.” They treated their trucks better. Escape attempts — and there were many, because the women fought their captors constantly — were punished by gang rape or execution. Some attempted suicide when they couldn’t get away. Others smeared dirt and ash on their daughters’ faces and their own, an old Yezidi practice meant to make them unattractive to their keepers.
Otten renders all of this in the best kind of humanist journalism: lucid, transparent, grimly realistic. She is a guide who shifts readers from scene to scene, from voice to voice, from disaster to disaster. Although With Ash on Their Faces does have a temporal chronology that stretches from August 2014 to the near present, its structural logic is ultimately more fractured, episodic, looping, dreamlike. This form mimics the recurrent nature of trauma, as the testimonies she collects overlap into a horrifying texture.
Marketizing rape wasn’t the only way ISIS tried to break the Yezidis. Boys as young as seven were taken to camps where they would be brainwashed and trained to fight. Other children were simply killed in front of their mothers; sometimes their bodies were buried in graves so shallow that hungry dogs dug them out. One woman who had been sold multiple times tried unsuccessfully to kill herself and her children by soaking them with gasoline. “I have lost all my other memories,” another recounts. The awful scenes keep accumulating, and it can be tough going for a reader. But Otten’s moral imagination is embodied in her narrative style. Her prose points to these atrocities — it says this happened, look at it.
For the women who have escaped ISIS (and Otten tells their stories of flight in gripping, vivid fashion) these experiences have lasting effects. Some of the fallout is physical. One Yezidi gynecologist estimates that 90 percent of her patients have been raped; their ailments range from chronic urinary-tract infections to debilitating pelvic pain. Then there is the psychological residue of captivity. Another Yezidi doctor has had some success with narrative therapy, which allows people with PTSD to share their ordeals, but most of the women Otten meets have suicidal thoughts, and some go through with it — “Some girls killed themselves because they didn’t want to face their families,” reports an escapee.
Nearly 4,000 Yezidi women and girls remain missing. To date, no one — not the Kurds, not the Iraqi government, not the Americans — has attempted a large-scale rescue mission. In the void, a loose network of businessmen smugglers has developed, often charging families enormous sums of money in exchange for their female relatives. It has been at best a partial success. Meanwhile, after being hobbled by coalition airstrikes and grinding battles with the Peshmerga, ISIS is rebounding. Sinjar City and nearby towns remain in ruins, and the region’s various players are scuffling for geopolitical and military influence. Three hundred and fifty thousand Yezidis are still displaced in Iraqi Kurdistan. The women endure amid all this, ignored (when not exploited) by most Western journalists. “No matter where we are, we think only about those of us who are still in captivity,” a survivor tells Otten. After finishing this slim book, you too may think of little else.
¤
Ryan Boyd teaches at the University of Southern California.
Book Review – Cathy Otten’s ‘With Ash on their Faces’
by Orsola Torrisi
In the first days of August 2014, after capturing the vast city of Mosul, Daesh (or the Islamic State) fighters directed their expansion towards the mountainous region of Sinjar, fanning out across the plain of Nineveh, near Iraq’s border with Syria. It is this region that approximately 400,000 Yazidis, a long-persecuted religious minority whose belief system draws on elements of Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Islam and Christianity, have made their homeland for generations. Cathy Otten’s With Ash on Their Faces: Yezidi Women and the Islamic State is one of the first accounts of the genocidal campaign Daesh unleashed against the Yazidi community in Iraq, and an intelligent depiction of Yazidi women’s ongoing resilience, suffering and survival.
Otten’s book is broken into three sections, reflecting the progression of events as they occurred. After a short, but necessary overview of the recent political history of the area, detailing the intricate power relationships between the Yazidi community, the Kurdish minority and the Iraqi government during and after Saddam Hussein’s rule, With Ash on Their Faces begins with a scene-setting picture of the days before the attack. Engaging extensively with individual stories, and interjecting herself only to maintain the readability of the excerpts she collected, Otten traces the abrupt change of scenery from the celebrations marking the end of the Yazidi fasting period to the confusion, fear and anxiety provoked by the arrival of the jihadist group. The survivors, now mainly residing in camps and temporary shelters in Northern Kurdistan, vividly depict the climax of tension, panic and abject terror which quickly spread across Yazidi villages and describe with intensity their feelings of bewilderment and insecurity once realising that they had been left unprotected amidst Daesh’s onslaught.
A valuable feature of With Ash on Their Faces is already clear at this point: instead of solely focusing on the Yazidi survivors’ accounts of their suffering, Otten chooses not to limit her sample of testimonies. She wisely enriches the description by drawing on conversations with other relevant actors, including Peshmerga and other Kurdish fighters. With care and impartiality (a difficult task given the sensitivity of the issue), Otten presents competing narratives on the controversial role played by the Iraqi military, and the Kurdish militias in particular, during Daesh’s offensive, thereby providing much-needed context on the dynamics behind the assault. A similar approach would be particularly welcome in the debate on how to bring Daesh fighters to justice for their crimes in Iraq, as questions of responsibility of other actors have started to emerge.
The bulk of the book is then dedicated to the immediate and the long-lasting consequences of Daesh’s assault. Through the moving narrations of her interviewees, Otten reconstructs the events and the desperate struggle of Yazidi families forced to flee their homes. While some, besieged by Daesh on Mount Sinjar, were left to die in torrid temperatures, suffering from dehydration, lack of food and exhaustion, others were killed, kidnapped, transported to Daesh prisons or forced to covert and coerced to join the jihadist militant group. Women and young girls were raped, enslaved and auctioned off as concubines to Daesh militias.
It is to these women that Otten wants, specifically, to ‘give a voice’. The second section of the book is thus dedicated to women’s experiences of captivity in Daesh’s prisons and members’ houses, while the third focuses on how their resilience (but also the help of accomplices) enabled many of them and their families to escape enslavement. The survivors describe Daesh’s methods of subjugation, including lock-ups, systematic assaults and gang-rape, starvation and verbal abuse, but also often reflect on their coping mechanisms. In essence, their stories speak of a change, a progression from a state of disbelief into one of strenuous resistance and attempts to escape and survive.
The second important contribution of With Ash on Their Faces is thus Otten’s capacity to shape the contours of violence and genocide from the experiences and the agency of women. Otten seeks (successfully, for the most part) to document the ways in which Yazidi women facing torture and oppression exercise agency and endeavour to remain the shapers of their lives, even in a de-humanising context. Through these female ‘lenses’, the book unearths the complicated influence of gender issues in conflict settings, unsilencing women’s struggles and experiences of horrific violence endured simply because they are women.
Despite the distressing nature of the testimonies, perhaps another remarkable aspect of the book is the delicacy, free from sensationalism or excess, with which Otten approaches the narratives. A haunting feeling of neglect pervades the oral narratives of the Yazidi survivors, whether they point at their past or at their present, not unlike other female accounts of genocidal violence (e.g. the cases of the women of Srebrenica and Potočari). However, Otten does not overemphasise it. With Ash on Their Faces is not an attempt to merely move the reader’s compassion. Rather, it aims to unveil and acknowledge the experiences of the survivors, giving them a voice and looking at them as not merely passive sufferers.
Far from being a scholarly book, With Ash on Their Faces is an insightful read for anyone – inside and outside academia – with an interest in understanding today’s multi-ethnic and multi-religious Iraq. Most importantly though, it is an intense and morally needed chronicle of the Yazidis’ battle for survival, providing evidence for one of the most brutal acts of barbarity of this century and, from this, perhaps leading to something verging on accountability. Books like this are the first step towards the understanding and recognition of genocidal violence against the Yazidi community, and religious and ethnic minorities more broadly.
Orsola Torrisi is a MPhil/PhD candidate in Demography at the LSE Social Policy Department and a Research Assistant at the LSE Middle East Centre. Her research explores the demographic effects of armed conflict. Orsola is currently working on a project aimed at documenting and identifying Yazidi victims of ISIS violence with demographic methods and individual-level data.
January 04 2018
By WILLIAM ARMSTRONG william.armstrong@hdn.com.tr
Yezidi women and the Islamic State
‘With Ash on their Faces: Yezidi Women and the Islamic State’ by Cathy Otten (OR Books, $17, 238 pages)
ISIS lost its last remaining territory in Syria and Iraq throughout 2017, three years after its lightening emergence came to wider international attention in 2014. When the jihadist group first emerged the plight of the Yezidis – an ancient religious group living mostly in northern Iraq and numbering less than one million worldwide - garnered widespread coverage. Their attempted genocide at the hands of ISIS is no longer in the media spotlight but it remains an open wound.
“With Ash on their Faces: Yezidi Women and the Islamic State” by journalist Cathy Otten is a deeply reported account of the Yezidis’ suffering under ISIS. The book is based on more than 100 interviews about the ISIS attack on the Yezidi homeland of Sinjar (known to the Kurds as Shengal) in August 2014 and its aftermath. Particularly focusing on the attack’s impact on the women captured, it is a sensitive account that Otten pieces together unsentimentally and unsensationally.
After ISIS attacked Sinjar city - home to 80,000 including Yezidis, Christians, Sunni and Shia Muslims, Kurds, Turkomen, and Arabs – over 100,000 people fled for refuge on the Sinjar Mountain to the north. Those who were able to reach the mountain were stranded, starving and surrounded by ISIS militants, while those who could not flee were rounded up. Many of the men were massacred while the women and girls were enslaved: Chained, beaten, raped, and passed around like animals.
It was just the latest episode in a grim history of oppression for the Yezidis, who remember 74 separate genocides targeting them over generations. The title of Otten’s book refers to a survival tactic Yezidi women have learned over time to smear ash on their faces and cut their hair to become undesirable to their captors and avoid sexual assault. Through centuries of resistance, survival and storytelling, Yezidis have come to intimately know the hills, slopes, and valleys of their homeland, developing unique strategies to persist.
Their unorthodox beliefs have led to the Yezidis’ constant persecution. They believe in reincarnation and revere a peacock angel - known as Melek Tawuse - as God’s representative on earth. This angel is often miscast as the devil of other religions, resulting in the Yezidis being persecuted as infidels by many hardline Muslim rulers who demanded they convert. Today the Yezidis remain a highly insular group, prohibiting marriage outside the faith and seemingly condemned to inexorable demographic decline.
Otten narrates the aftermath of how Sinjar fell by focusing on the stories of a number of women. The details are often distressing: A hellish cycle of buying, selling, torture and rape. “By enslaving thousands of Yezidi women, ISIS aimed to use them as incubators for ‘true’ ISIS members, thereby replacing Yezidis with their own people and culture … Implicit in this was the goal of eliminating the Yezidi community, the idea that society would be better without them, which is common to all genocides,” writes Otten.
It is remarkable that she was able to win the confidence of many women to hear such intimate stories: “With Ash on their Faces” simply could not have been written by a male journalist. The Yezidis of Iraq are part of a tradition and honor-bound culture, which makes the ISIS attacks on Yezidi women particularly grave. “In Yezidi culture, as in much of the Middle East, a man’s honor is linked to the chastity of his close female relatives. Rape brings shame and suffering to the whole community, which is one reason why it is used as a weapon of war in male-dominated cultures,” writes Otten. As a result, when the first Yezidi women began escaping ISIS in 2015 a dark cloud of doubt hung over their return. The community’s spiritual leader, Baba Sheikh, ultimately took the brave decision to ignore the dictates of tradition and to accept the women back into the fold.
His decree has helped most of ISIS’s Yezidi captives reintegrate back into society. But many Yazidis remain captive and shadows continue to linger over the community’s future. Sinjar was taken from ISIS in November 2015 but over two years on Sinjar city remains in ruins. It has hosted a hostile standoff between the Peshmerga of the Iraqi Kurdistan Regional Government and PKK-aligned groups, with each force providing arms, training and patronage to local Yezidis. With ISIS almost entirely cleared from the stage, Sinjar is also now increasingly the site of strategic jostling between Turkey and Iran.
Surrounded by forces larger than them, Yezidis remain “stuck in a complex series of client-patron relationships with Kurdish leaders where ethnic identification is used in exchange for promises of safety,” writes Otten. As throughout much of history, their position remains shrouded in uncertainty.