Phones, guns and night-time Yazidi rescues
Daniel Nelson
Sabaya is the first Yazidi thriller. And it has a particularly powerful —and upsetting — impact because it’s a documentary.
The Yazidi minority in Kurdish areas of Iraq hit the headlines in 2014 when Daesh (ISIS) attacked them, murdering thousands and seizing girls and women as sex slaves.
Their treatment was horrifying, and for many the ordeal continued even after ISIS was defeated because their fleeing captors kept them prisoner.
As a result. even in the infamous Al-Hol camp across the border in Syria, where many ISIS followers are kettled, Yazidi girls are women are also held in ISIS families.
Tracking them down and rescuing them is dangerous, because there are guns in the camps and ISIS followers in the surrounding areas. A small band of men, and, incredibly, former enslaved Yazidi women, are risking their lives to get them out of the camps and back in their own community.
Filmmaker Hohir Hirori, who left Kurdistan for Sweden in 1999, follows two of the rescuers, Mahmud and Ziyad from the Yazidi Home Centre, patiently trying to make phone contact with Yazidis in the camp, or tucking a gun into their belts before making a rapid night raid on a tent where they believe a Yazidi captive is held. The captors sometimes get wind of the attempted rescue and spirit the “wife” or servant away. The rescuers have to search and interrogate swiftly because it’s risky to hang around.
After one torchlight rescue they are fired at by a chasing car.
Between forays we see Mahmud at home (being told curtly by his wife to make his own coffee), making yet another call, or watching his fields burnt by people trying to intimidate him. At other times the camera focuses on rescued, disturbed women talking about their plight.
It’s an extraordinary and gripping story, with an extra punch towards the end when a group of women previously freed from the camp don the all-encompassing black cloaks of invisibility and are re-infiltrated into the camp in an attempt to obtain information on more captives. Many of these women have been beaten and abused and passed from man to man and yet are prepared to go undercover in a hostile, suspicious environment.
Amazing.
* Sabaya is showing at the Curzon Bloomsbury, Hackney Picturehouse, ICA; from 27 August: Cine Lumiere, Lexi. Info: dogwoof.com/sabaya/watch.dogwoof.com/film/sabaya