Solidarity needed for Iraq’s Yazidi choir

To help Yazidi girls and women recover from the trauma they experienced at the hands of IS, in 2019 the AMAR International Charitable Foundation helped establish the ‘Ashti Yazidi Women’s Choir’ in Iraq. Those involved with the choir were once IS captives and others lost family members as a result of the 2014 genocide. 

The choir sings about nature; the dawn, the harvest and the Sinjar mountain which the Yazidis consider holy. “This folk music, it’s also a kind of affiliation of our religion,” says Mamou Othman, who studies music as psychotherapy at the University of Dohuk. “There are special songs that only the Yazidis sing.”