The AMAR Foundation gives new meaning to working with refugees

Have you ever seen 'Escape from ISIS' on the UK's Channel 4? This Dispatches special from 2015 exposed the brutal regime suffered by millions of women living under Daesh. It also highlighted the extraordinary story of the underground networks of people who worked to save them. 

This is the AMAR Ashti (Peace) Choir, founded and led by Rana Sulaiman Halo. She has lived in the Khanke refugee camp in Iraq since 2014, and comes from a family of musicians. As Alice Fordham reported for NPR, with its dirt roads and dwellings, the camp can be a bleak place. 

But the beat of a daf, a drum sacred to Yazidis, throbs underneath loud, energetic singing. A dozen young Yazidi women are rehearsing folk songs. They sing about the dawn, the harvest and the Sinjar mountain the Yazidis consider holy. Sometimes their voices harmonize gently, sometimes they rise almost to a shout as the women chant. 

In 2019, Rana founded the AMAR Ashti Choir and is supported by the AMAR Foundation, a British based charity. Several women in the choir were ISIS captives and others have lost family members. “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.” 

The choir has performed in the U.K and AMAR has also recorded Yazidi folk songs and sacred religious music, and given these recordings to the University of Oxford’s Bodleian Library to archive for future generations. For further information on AMAR’s work with the Yazidi community, please contact the AMAR Foundation by e-mail or call 0207 799 2217. You can also make a donation to the Yazidi choir through the AMAR Foundation.