During 2019, dozens of Yazidi women and their children arrived in France in small groups to start a new life in safety. In their home country of Iraq or Syria, the Yazidis were the prey of the Islamic State group and suffered massacres, kidnappings, rapes and sexual slavery. How to overcome such trauma? How to start again in a foreign country with an unfamiliar culture and language? FRANCE 24 followed the first steps in France of these women and children who have been to hell and back.
In the course of 2019, some 500 Yazidis, comprised of around 100 women and their children, were welcomed in France as part of a special programme set up by the Élysée presidential palace. Thanks to the activism of Nadia Murad, a former sex slave of the Islamic State (IS) group and a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, these women and children were installed in all four corners of France in a bid to help them rebuild their lives.
>> Watch our interview with Nadia Murad: 'These criminals must be brought to justice'
For eight months, our reporters followed several of these women – Soma, Gulan and Mina – as they began rebuilding their lives in eastern France. Originally from Mount Sinjar in northern Iraq, they have survived the horrors of the IS group and are widowed after losing their husbands. Some of them have also lost their fathers or brothers in horrendous circumstances, while some of their relatives are still sex slaves of the Islamists in Iraq or Syria. Sometimes they have no news from these loved ones.
>> Watch our Revisited show: Iraq's Yazidis still haunted by Sinjar massacres
Like the other Yazidi survivors, Soma, Gulan and Mina are illiterate and come from rural families. Now installed in the east of France, they are supported by a team from the NGO Habitat et Humanisme (Habitat and Humanism) who help them with administrative procedures and with questions about the new culture they are discovering.
For security reasons, we were not able to film these women's faces or their children. We have also changed their names.
