Mindfield
Wars and terrorism are stressful. The traumatised have nowhere to turn
WHEN Neda told her children that she might have to kill them, they assented. Such was their suffering after Islamic State kidnapped and enslaved them, along with thousands of other Yazidis, a religious minority, in northern Iraq in 2014. Neda’s husband was taken and presumably killed; her eldest son, just 13 years old, was forced to fight with the jihadists. She shaved off the hair and eyebrows of her two young daughters to make them look boyish and sickly, so that IS rapists might leave them alone. Neda herself was raped, beaten and sold several times before she was bought and freed by relatives last year.
As Neda (not her real name) recounted her ordeal to aid workers at the Mamilyan camp for internally displaced people in the Kurdistan region of Iraq, she showed little emotion, the aid workers said. That is probably a coping mechanism. “If they give in one time and cry, they will not be able to stop crying for a while,” says Rezhna Mohammed, the director of psychological services for the SEED Foundation, which runs a centre in the camp. Neda, though, has only asked for cash (to repay her liberators). Few people in the Middle East seek or receive help for their mental suffering.
This article appeared in the Middle East & Africa section of the print edition under the headline "Mindfield"
More from Middle East & Africa
The Middle East has a militia problem
More than a quarter of the region’s 400m people live in states dominated by armed groups
How much do Palestinians pay to get out of Gaza?
Middlemen are profiting from Gazans’ desperation
Why Iranian dissidents love Cyrus, an ancient Persian king
The British Museum is sending one of Iran’s adored antiquities to Israel