A Gift of Healing

A gift of healing for the traumatized Yazidis

Photos: Personal archives

For most of us, ISIS is the bad memory of a radical Islamic group that occupied a large swath of land across Syria and Iraq and terrified the civilized world until its downfall last March. But for many of those who had been held in their clutches, there are lasting physical and psychological scars. The Yazidis, a small ethnic group largely concentrated in Iraq (whom ISIS considers “infidels”), bore the brunt of ISIS’s rampage when, in 2014, the jihadist fighters of the “Caliphate” swept through parts of northern Iraq and targeted all non-Muslims, murdering or enslaving most of the Yazidi tribe.

Here in Israel, we looked on in horror, but realistically, what could we do? We never imagined we’d be instrumental, five years later, in helping to heal the scars of those terror-filled years.

Our story began in 2016, when Ari Greenspan and I took an admittedly daunting Mishpacha-sponsored trip to Kurdistan in northern Iraq to look for remnants of the Jewish community. When my Bar Ilan University colleague, Dr. Yaakov Hoffman, heard about the planned trip, he was excited for reasons of his own. As a clinical psychologist with expertise in PTSD, he was aware that there were thousands of former ISIS captives languishing in refugee camps in Kurdistan. Before I could blink, he had put together a questionnaire to evaluate their psychological state and asked me to distribute it in some refugee camps. Those camps weren’t on our itinerary, and I really knew very little about PTSD, but I did know that Yaakov is a serious researcher and I began making contacts who might be able to help in this project.

The results of our preliminary study were both enlightening and distressing, although not altogether surprising. While evaluating the data on the incidence of PTSD, complex PTSD, insomnia, depression, and other lasting “gifts” from ISIS, Yaakov exclaimed, “Not only should we let the world know, but we also must do something to help them.”