The artists and their stories

Ivana is a young Yazidi artist from the village of Tel Qasab, near Sinjar in northern Iraq. She endured many months of brutality and suffering in ISIS captivity, but she does not refer to herself as a “survivor” because she does not consider herself a victim. By escaping her captors, she says she has beaten ISIS, and she now works tirelessly to bring perpetrators to justice. Ivana remembers a simple but happy village life with her parents and many siblings before the genocide of the Yazidi community by ISIS began in August 2014: “We didn’t have many opportunities, but we were still happy and tried to use the opportunities we had.” She pursued her education in the knowledge that her options were limited without a degree: “Women especially didn’t have many opportunities; they usually do the housework.

That’s why I wanted to be a doctor – I wanted to be a role model to other women.” Now living as a refugee in Germany, her ambition to work as a doctor remains. The special-quota project of the German federal state of Baden-Württemberg, which settled 1,100 Yazidi women and children, gave Ivana what she calls a “golden chance” to start a new life. “I am very proud of the people working on this project,” she says, “because they have saved the lives of others. If these people had stayed in Iraq, I don’t know what would have happened to them.”

Thabit Mikhael is an Assyrian sculptor and painter from Qaraqosh, also known as Bakhdida, in northern Iraq. He graduated as an artist from Baghdad University, and was producing sculptures for local churches that had been attacked by terrorists even before ISIS targeted his community in 2014. The Assyrians have some of the most ancient cultural roots in the region, and Thabit explains that he fell in love with art because of his historic surroundings: “The main reasons I wanted to be an artist were the circumstances around us. There are Assyrian artefacts everywhere in Nineveh, there are statues and sculptures all around us.” At the end of June 2014, after ISIS had captured nearby Mosul, there was a mortar attack on the town, serving as an early warning to the Assyrian community that they might be forced to flee their homes.

Thabit describes a time of great fear and anguish in the time between that initial attack and the arrival of ISIS in his hometown. Eventually around 50 of the ca. 40,000 population of Bakhdida and a neighbouring town stayed behind, their fates unknown. Thabit says that many families and old people to escape: “Fortunately we could flee and the disaster was not as bad as what happened to the Yazidis in Sinjar.” Thabit was able to flee to Ankawa, the predominantly Christian suburb of Erbil. Months after Bakhdida was liberated in October 2016, he returned to the town and participated in a project to clean ISIS graffiti from the walls and replace it with Assyrian language and hopeful, beautiful artworks.

Nahrin Malki is an Assyrian professional artist and painter currently living in Sweden. Born in Syria, she fled to the Netherlands almost two decades ago, when the Assad regime began to attack the Assyrian community, which has some of the most ancient cultural roots in the region. Indeed, the Assyrian plight in Iraq and Syria is similar to the Yazidi experience, with tens of thousands of people driven out of their ancestral lands. Nahrin grew up in a secure and liberal family environment where art and learning were encouraged. She was always drawing as a child, even copying stickers for friends who could not afford them, yet she felt trapped and unable to express herself under a regime which suppressed artistic freedoms and creativity. It was in the Netherlands that she was finally able to realize her artistic potential, studying at the AKI Kunstacademie in Enschede: “The Dutch system gave me the freedom to express myself and I immediately felt comfortable; they focused on humanitarian aspects in art and gave meaning to my work”, Nahrin explains.

Her main objective now is to connect the Assyrian people with their heritage and collective experience, through the central theme of suffering in her artwork. The Assyrian diaspora share collective memories of pain, and such communities need help to rehabilitate their lands and repatriate their people. Nahrin wants to remind the international community that Assyrian culture “is very rich and can enrich international culture – our civilization gave a lot to the world.” She works for the recognition of her people as an official ethnic minority in Iraq and Syria, and for the protection of their basic right to practise their religion: “The only solution we can come up with is that they give us a safe haven, with autonomy to protect ourselves, because we do not feel safe among the other groups”, says Nahrin. In her artwork Nahrin combines diverse techniques and materials to move away from the rigidity of traditional art. While black is a dominant colour throughout, she experiments with other colour palettes and says: “I do not pick the colours – the colours tend to pick me.”

Salam is from the village of Ba’adre in the Nineveh plains of northern Iraq, close to the sacred Yazidi site of Lalish. He now lives in France with his wife and their son who was born in April 2020. Salam grew up as one of eleven siblings and was studying Arabic at the nearby University of Duhok when ISIS launched its attack on Sinjar. He is keen one day to finish his studies and perhaps work as a teacher and translator because of his love for languages, but his principal vocation is art. Although he and some of his brothers made pencil drawings while living in Iraq, there was little support for their interests: “Nobody appreciated my art or why I was painting”, says Salam. After the attack began in August 2014, Salam and his family knew they would never again feel safe in Iraq. With the genocide still ongoing in February 2016, they left Ba’adre and began the perilous journey to safety. After numerous failed attempts over land and sea the family reached Greece, and another nine months in a refugee camp would follow before Salam’s parents and family members began to be accepted, although not all together, by a UNHCR relocation programme.

“When we were finally reunited in France,” Salam says, “we all started crying and we did not know how to express our thanks to France.” It was difficult to begin a new life, but in France he soon found friends and a love for the traditional crêpe. Yet it was in Greece that Salam and his brothers had first found support for their artwork, when a volunteer in the camp brought them the materials to begin painting with acrylics and oil. By October 2016 Salam’s brother Ismail had his first seven paintings exhibited in Vienna, Austria, and Salam then had his own works exhibited in Zurich, Switzerland, in early 2017. Salam, Ismail, and their brother Jason now run the website Brotherly Art, displaying all their artworks online and at exhibitions worldwide, and donating a share of their profits to refugees and displaced people in need. For his painting “The Darkness is Covering Me” Salam collaborated with his brother Sahir, who wrote an accompanying poem.

Falah is a Yazidi artist currently living in an IDP camp in Iraqi Kurdistan. He has lived in the camp by ISIS in the summer of 2014, a moment which marked the beginning of the latest genocide in his community’s long history of persecution and suffering. In the difficult conditions of the camp he has fashioned a new career for himself as an artist, adopting the pseudonym Falah Al-Rasam (the Painter). He has now sold several paintings and grown an online following for his artwork, even though he produced primarily written works before the terrible upheavals of 2014. “At that time I wrote poetry and stories about Yazidis,” says Falah, “but I prefer doing art, I see myself in art more than writing.” In Sinjar in 2014, an anxious period awaiting an attack by ISIS culminated in the offensive of 3 August.

Falah, his parents, and his five siblings were able to escape the following day, all together in one vehicle passing through checkpoints as ISIS militants fought SyrianKurdish forces near the border town of Rabia. While some of his family members have since moved to the Duhok region, Falah continues to live in the IDP camp, but a chance encounter in 2018 with an American woman living in his family’s village allowed him to realise his artistic potential. She brought paints and art supplies from Duhok and encouraged Falah to try his hand at oil painting, a skill he has quickly developed. Like his fellow Yazidi artists, Falah comments on the lack of opportunities in Sinjar before the crisis: “People didn’t care about art; actually, I didn’t care about art before 2014. Resources were very poor, and my vision to be an artist was poor.” Falah’s literary background and experience in writing poetry and short stories inspires his art.

Juliet has been living in an Iraqi IDP camp since 2015. After the initial ISIS attack on her home region of Sinjar in August 2014, she and her family fled to the Syrian border and then to Duhok, and her father and youngest sister were subsequently taken in as refugees in Germany. Juliet was not permitted to join them as she was over 18 years of age. Juliet remembers a pleasant and simple life in Sinjar before the genocide, attending school and going on picnics with friends and family. Even on the eve of 03 August she did not believe the rumours that ISIS would attack.

“That night we heard and saw the bombs,” says Juliet, “and in the early morning we prepared ourselves with two cars to go to Mount Sinjar.” Among large crowds of Yazidis fleeing their villages and ascending the mountain, the cars broke down and Juliet and her family had to continue on foot, leaving food and water supplies behind. “My father was very sick,” she explains, “so we had to stay somewhere close by, not at the top of the mountain. We stayed in the same place for a week and received water and simple food from local farmers.” Juliet is fighting for her Yazidi community to be treated equally, and for her people to live in peace within Iraq, just as it is possible in other countries.

Sadiq is a young Yazidi artist from the Sinjar region of northern Iraq. For the past six years since the ISIS attack on his homeland began, he has been living in an IDP camp in Iraqi Kurdistan. While some of his friends and relatives have since returned to Sinjar province, Sadiq is unable to go back as his house was destroyed in the fighting when ISIS drove the Yazidi people out of their ancestral lands. Life in the camp is hard for Sadiq and his siblings – two brothers and one sister – with Sadiq working at the Ministry of Education to support his family financially. The Coronavirus pandemic has exacerbated the family’s hardships, as Sadiq has lost what little income he had.

Sadiq explains that isolation is a particular problem in the camp: “Now everyone is scattered around, there is no-one from my village in this camp. Some of the people I know are living in other camps or outside Iraq, but my family and I have been alone here for six years now.” He misses living among his own people before the genocide, but even now in the camp he thinks being reunited with some his community could make a world of difference: “Life would be better than it is right now. At least we could see each other, talk to each other; if one of us needs something the others could help them.” Sadiq has always been interested in drawing and art, although like many fellow Iraqis he points out that there was little to no support for artistic expression where he grew up.

Saher is a young Yazidi Iraqi artist working by the name Saher Art. Since the ISIS attack on the Yazidi population in the Sinjar region of northern Iraq in August 2014, Saher and his family have been displaced and living in an IDP camp. He recalls a difficult start to life, as his family were considered enemies of the Ba’athist regime before 2003 and Saher’s family members, although well educated, could not be hired in government positions. “When the Ba’ath party fell, after that my family members were able to get jobs”, Saher explains. Before the 2014 attack he lived with his parents and six siblings in the village of Khana Sor, north of Mount Sinjar, and he says that the people felt safe and happy. Saher’s own dream was to become a nurse because he saw that there was a lack of medical staff and he wanted to help people in the medical field.

In the days leading up to the ISIS offensive on Sinjar in August 2014, everyone was afraid of an imminent attack and the possibility of losing loved ones. “During 3 August, some friends in the villages to the south of the mountain called to warn us that ISIS had begun attacking the villages,” Saher says. He and his family wanted to find a safe refuge, and there was nowhere to go except the mountain, where they would stay for eight days before fleeing to Duhok. On the mountain, children and elderly people were dying of dehydration and hunger, and news also reached those who had fled that people were being killed in the villages below. Saher says that life in the camp today is difficult particularly in terms of mental health: “When you are living in the camp you feel like you are always having psychological problems.

Suhalia is a young Yazidi artist currently living in Australia. As the ISIS attack on Sinjar began on 3 August, Suhalia and her large family attempted to flee the area in a single car that soon broke down. Forced to walk, she and her family were quickly rounded up by ISIS fighters, and Suhalia’s ordeal began. Aged just fourteen at the time, she was separated from her relatives and taken to Mosul, where she was kept in sexual enslavement for three years. She was told that her family had been killed, and she began to make artworks of their images to bring their memories back to life.

Although these pictures were immediately destroyed by her captors, she carried on drawing. The ISIS guards would take anything with which she could make images and on occasion even tie her hands to the prison bars. Unable to paint the faces of the people she loved, she regularly attempted suicide to escape the pain. In response, the guards rubbed salt into her wounds to prevent her making further attempts. Suhalia was bought and sold as chattel between ISIS fighters on eight occasions.

Jamil is a Yazidi artist from the town of Afrin in northern Syria. He has lived in Germany since before the 2014 genocide perpetrated by ISIS, having fled persecution in Syria ten years earlier via Lebanon and Greece. From an early age he has wanted to depict Yazidi culture and suffering, and to show the world what it means to be a Yazidi. Even in his home region in Syria, where relatively many Yazidis lived, it was a frightening experience to be outcast and treated with suspicion. “Every time we said we were Yazidis,” says Jamil, “people took distance from us, went away from us.”

Long before the genocide, many Yazidis were forced to hide their identities to protect themselves: “We wanted to say who we are, but we were afraid what would happen, afraid that they would not treat us as fellow humans.” Observing the events of 2014 from Germany, he felt helpless: “It is impossible to describe how much pain I felt; it was impossible for us to do anything,” he says. In Syria Jamil practised his art from the age of six and later studied while also working in industry. He formally learnt his craft at the Institute of Fine Art in Aleppo and says he has practised every day since. To Jamil, the Yazidi culture is a compelling and worthy subject for his art.

Hussam was a soldier in the Iraqi Army when ISIS launched their offensive on Mosul in 2014. After enduring poor health and months in an IDP camp, he began retraining as a painter, which gave him hope and strength. His work here ‘interprets the nightmares women had when they lost their loved ones, the moments of ripping the soul’.

Yahya is an artist, actor and director from the Tal Afar District of Nineveh. A former soldier who fought against al-Qaeda, he and his family were displaced to Baghdad for five years when ISIS took control of Nineveh. Yahya has since returned to his hometown and is ‘looking forward to a safe and stable environment that guarantees a decent life for me and my family, an environment of security, safety, love, and peace’.