With Ash on Their Faces

Yezidi Women and the Islamic State

Cathy Otten

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Paperback

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English

OR Books
11 October 2022

Genocide & ethnic cleansing; Gender studies: women; War crimes

ISIS's genocidal attack on the Yezidi population in northern Iraq in 2014 brought the world's attention to the small faith that numbers less than one million worldwide. That summer ISIS massacred Yezidi men and enslaved women and children. More than one hundred thousand Yezidis were besieged on Sinjar Mountain. The US began airstrikes to roll back ISIS, citing a duty to save the Yezidis, but the genocide is still ongoing.

The headlines have moved on but thousands of Yezidi women and children remain in captivity, and many more are still displaced. Sinjar is now free from ISIS but the Yezidi homeland is at the centre of growing tensions amongst the city's liberators, making returning home for the Yezidis almost impossible.

The mass abduction of Yezidi women and children is here conveyed with extraordinary intensity in the first-hand reporting of a young journalist who has been based in Iraqi Kurdistan for the past four years, covering the war with ISIS and its impact on the people of the country.

Otten tells the story of the ISIS attacks, the mass enslavements of Yezidi women and the fallout from the disaster. She challenges common perceptions of Yezidi female victimhood by focusing on stories of resistance passed down by generations.

Yezidi women describe how, in the recent conflict, they followed the tradition of their ancestors who, a century ago during persecutions at the fall of the Ottoman empire, put ash on their faces to make themselves unattractive and try to avoid being raped.

Today, over 3,000 Yezidi women and girls remain in the Caliphate where they are bought and sold, and passed between fighters as chattel. But many others have escaped or been released. Otten bases her book on interviews with these survivors, as well as those who smuggled them to safety, painstakingly piecing together their accounts of enslavement. Their deeply moving personal narratives bring alive a human tragedy.

By: Cathy Otten
Imprint: OR Books
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 190mm, Width: 127mm,
ISBN: 9781682192870
ISBN 10: 1682192873
Pages: 256
Publication Date: 11 October 2022
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Cathy Ottenis a British writer and journalist based in Iraqi Kurdistan. She writes for a range of publications including theIndependent,Newsweek, BBC,TIME,Vogue, Politico,Monocle, theGuardianand theTelegraph. She is a regular commentator on TV and radio, talking about Iraq and the war with ISIS.

Reviews for With Ash on Their Faces: Yezidi Women and the Islamic State

Praise for the hardback: This is an intelligent and perceptive book about one of the great tragedies of our age. It is also an inspiring story of resistance and survival that everybody should read. -Patrick Cockburn The best kind of humanist journalism: lucid, transparent, grimly realistic.... (N)o book has covered it better. -Ryan Boyd, Los Angeles Review of Books Contemporary testimony [grounded in a] wealth of historical context ... an urgently necessary chronicle of the Yazidi genocide. -Times Literary Supplement Woven through with heart-breaking, terrifying accounts of its survivors, and demanding an understanding of their community's historical persecution, Otten's searing chronicle of ISIS' genocide of the Yezidis is compelling and devastatingly necessary. -Sareta Ashraph, former Analyst, UN Commission of Inquiry on Syria There are two constants in the modern history of genocides: they are recognized too late and their victims, particularly if they are women, are presented as passive sufferers. Cathy Otten's important and morally urgent book tells the story of an ongoing crime and a history of strength and resistance. Told with great care but with neither sentiment nor sensationalism, With Ash on Their Faces, needs to be read by all those who care about justice-and by those too occupied with global power to care. -Lyndsey Stonebridge, author of The Judicial Imagination Otten tells the Yezidis' 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. -Anthony Loyd