An organization specialized in documenting the situation of the Yazidis said, on Sunday, that the recent suicides in the Yazidi camps in Iraq are “separate and unconnected cases”, despite the close time between them and the fact that three of them claimed the lives of young women.
Three girls died, two of them at the age of 15, and a young Yezidi committed suicide – as announced – within two days, while the organization said that two of them were subjected to “electronic blackmail.”
The three girls are from Sharia, Essien, and Bersfi camps in the Dohuk governorate.
The director of the Sinjar branch of the “Yezidi Documentation Organization”, Khairy Ali Ibrahim, told The Eastern Herald that two 15-year-old girls were subjected to electronic blackmail by unknown persons, which prompted them to commit suicide “for fear of scandal.”
Ibrahim said that the third girl committed suicide after family and marital problems and complications with her family.
According to a source inside Sharia camp, “Girls in the camp are sometimes subjected to exploitation by influential people.”
The members of the Yazidi religion who settled in camps to escape the mass massacre carried out by ISIS elements against thousands of people of the religion in Sinjar, while more than 5,000 women were kidnapped, according to various statistics, only a few of them were freed.
The Yazidi journalist, Saman Daoud, told The Eastern Herald that suicides exist in abundance after 2014, and the extermination of the Yazidis as a result of ISIS’s invasion of their areas gave birth to a bad psychological state for everyone without exception.
Ibrahim said, however, that his information indicated that “the three girls did not commit suicide due to the genocide-related cause, as they were young when it happened.”
Nevertheless, Ibrahim admits that “the repercussions of displacement and living in camps have caused social problems that were unknown to the Yazidis, including the non-cautious use of the Internet.”
The United Nations Mission in Iraq had warned, in a report last month, of an increase in suicides over the past years.
More than 590 people died in Iraq in 2019 due to suicide, and another 1,112 people attempted suicide, 80 percent of them women, according to the international organization’s figures.
For many years, many Iraqi families have suffered from mental health problems caused by past conflicts and economic conditions.
The journalist Daoud said, “The repercussions of displacement and extermination will continue because the conditions of the Yazidis are still poor, whether in the camps or in their areas, where the living conditions are poor and job opportunities are non-existent, and the spread of the Coronavirus has increased their suffering, which has prolonged after a continuous displacement of six years.”
A large proportion of the displaced Yazidis are still living in tents that were supposed to be temporary, and after that, they were transferred to “caravans” or stone buildings.
The source said from inside Sharia camp, “The conditions are very bad in the camp, and the psychological and social condition in it is greatly deteriorating.”
