Nagham Nawzat Hasan is a Yazidi ginecologist and ostetrician [born in 1978, with Iraqi Yazidis origins]. She was working in the city of Baashiqa - 14 km from Mosul - when she was forced to run away in 2014, for the area being invaded by Isis troops, that have subsequently done a true genocide- as defined by the UN - against Yazidi people.
The escaping brought her near Dohuk, a refugees zone controlled by Iraqi Kurdistan. Few months after her arrival, she hears about two Yazidi women arrived in Doha and decides to contact them. Since then - pushed by the willingness to offer her help and her capacities to the people - she has decided to dedicate her working life to seek and help the women survived from Isis’ violence to regain confidence after what they have suffered.
She offers herself as a reference figure, both medically and psychologically, by going in their houses - where they sometimes tend to close themselves up - and obtaining a first contact. She listens to the brutal stories of women sold as sex slaves or imprisoned for months or years, victims of torture and systematic rape. Their condition touches her deeply, as women and Yazidi herself. Husbands killed and children kidnapped, educated to become militants or sold into the illicit human trade. Has she told to the UNHCR, Hasan uses to write on her notebook countless of pages of horrific stories that the survivors tell her, like a ritual and a therapy for herself too. More than 200 memoirs to testify what happened, as a moral duty to keep the memory alive.
Most of the women suffer from continuous pain and have sexually transmitted infections as a result of the numerous rapes and their condition is extremely bad also in a psychological perspective. Hasan’s aim is to give confidence to those women who have lost everything: homes, husbands, children, dignity. She works with passion and humanity, not only on the field but also internationally, asking more attention even after the end of the violence, which is an important moment when the battle of re-giving them a place where to live and something to believe in is fought, fundamental steps for trying to rebuild up their own life.
After having created her own NGO ‘Hope Makers for Women’, by the end of 2014 she received the Silver Rose prize - from the European Solidar Organisation - for her work in the field of Human Rights protection, and in March 2016 she was also honoured with the International Women of Courage Award by the American Secretary of State John Kerry. A figure professionally close to the Nobel Prize winner and Righteous in the Garden of Milan Denis Mukwege, nowadays Hasan still works as humanitarian operator offering her medical and psychological support in Dohuk, where she has already cured more than a thousand women, receiving compliments from the Nobel Prize for Peace winner - and Isis violence survivor - Nadia Murad.
