The World Moved On. She Stayed to Defend Yazidi Women.
Co-published with Middle East Uncovered.
Taban Shoresh never spoke about surviving genocide in Iraq. Growing up in the UK as a refugee, she tried to be “as British as possible” and avoid her painful past. It wasn’t until the Kurdistan Regional Government asked her to speak in the House of Lords for Genocide Remembrance Day in 2014 that something clicked.
“I realized that I needed to be doing something more connected to my past,” Shoresh, 41, said.
A few months later, another genocide drew her back to the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. August 3 marked 11 years since the Islamic State group launched a brutal attack on the Yazidi people of northern Iraq. Over several weeks, more than 3,000 were killed and over 6,000 abducted by the militants, many of them women and girls who were sold into sexual slavery.
Realizing that her lived experience could offer vital insight, Shoresh quit her job at an asset management firm in London and flew to Iraq for the first time since her family fled in the 1980s. “If I can prevent one person from going through what I went through, I'm happy with that,” she said.
Shoresh went on to help more than 100,000 women and girls—many from the Yazidi community—rebuild their lives, according to the latest figures from The Lotus Flower, the NGO she founded to support those affected by conflict. Based on needs articulated by these women, their programs have grown to include psychosocial support, girls’ health, creative therapies, adult literacy, a women’s business incubator, gender-based violence awareness and support programs for genocide survivors, among others.
It’s a big milestone, she acknowledges, but there’s another 82,000 to go before she meets her goal. “At the very least, I want to positively impact the [total] number of people lost during my genocide, which was 182,000 people,” said Shoresh, who in 2024 was awarded an OBE for her services to refugees. Estimates for the number of Kurds killed during the Anfal campaign range from between 50,000-1000,0000, according to rights groups, and the Kurd’s own figure of 182,000.
Shoresh was four years old when Iraqi soldiers came to her family home in Kurdistan. It was the late 1980s, and then-Iraqi president Saddam Hussein had launched the so-called Anfal campaign, which oversaw the mass extermination of Kurds in northern Iraq amid the ongoing Iran-Iraq War.
Shoresh’s father was a peshmerga soldier fighting for the Kurdish resistance, but he was away in the mountains that day. Shoresh, her mother and her grandparents were thrown in prison. She still remembers the stench of urine in that crowded cell, where people had to take turns lying down.
They remained there for weeks, until one day they were herded outside and onto buses. Too young to fully understand what was going on, Shoresh vividly recalls the wails and screams as adults saw the diggers up ahead.
Live burials were one of the methods used by Saddam Hussein’s regime to torment victims of the Anfal campaign before killing them. “They would make you see the diggers so you know that you’re going to be buried alive,” Shoresh said in a video series that documents her journey. “You witness the hole being dug with these diggers, and then they [lay] everyone in, alive, and throw soil over you in really small pieces.”
Mass graves containing the remains of Kurdish men, women and children executed during that time are still being uncovered in Iraq alongside more recent sites from 2014 to 2017, when ISIS massacred thousands of people in its targeting of Shia Muslims, Christians and Yazidi minorities.
Shoresh doesn’t know who saved her and her family, but at some point the bus stopped and their driver changed. Kurdish drivers boarded and drove them to a remote spot. The passengers were told to flee.
Her family then went on the run, travelling from village to village to evade discovery. Around them, the Iran-Iraq war raged, and rural regions were pounded by bombs. Later, in art therapy sessions after moving to the UK at the age of six, Shoresh would draw those planes dropping bombs and pictures of people dying in the street.
It’s one of the reasons The Lotus Flower’s child protection program felt so important to her. “Children should be allowed to be children… we forget the impact it has on children when they experience displacement,” she said in the video.
After a year in hiding, Shoresh and her family crossed the border into Iran, travelling on horseback at night to the home of relatives, where her father would join them. He arrived on a stretcher, close to death. He had been targeted in a mass poisoning by the regime but survived after Amnesty International flew him to the UK for treatment.
It took a year to process the paperwork for Shoresh and her family to join him, leaving behind everything they knew to start a new life. They chose to shut out the horrors they had experienced in the past. “We didn't speak about it at all,” she said.
That is, until August 2014, when the targeting of minorities by ISIS unlocked something in Shoresh. Traveling back to Kurdistan, she joined a helicopter mission conducted by the British government to deliver aid and airlift people off Mount Sinjar in Iraq. Tens of thousands of people had been trapped there for days in 104-degree (40 Celsius) heat without food, water or medical care as ISIS rampaged through Yazidi villages, killing over 3,000 men, women and children.
“I saw humanity in desperation, and I never wanted to see people like that again,” Shoresh said.
She stayed in Iraq for fifteen months, working with the Rwanga Foundation to deliver aid, build refugee camps and support women and girls rescued from ISIS-controlled territories. When she returned to the UK, she knew she was just getting started. Sitting in her living room, Shoresh sketched the outlines of an idea that would help women and girls on a wider scale, laying the foundations for the NGO she would form in 2016.
There were plenty of barriers. She was a single mother who had survived an abusive marriage and was battling Crohn’s Disease. “I didn't have money, I didn't have connections, I didn’t have any of those things and it made it a lot harder, but I didn't stop,” she said.
Funding, in particular, has been difficult, even when the plight of Yazidi women was a donor priority.
Shoresh, who isn’t Yazidi, said that donors often prioritized Yazidi-led efforts, which forced her to find alternative funding streams. This has proved beneficial in light of recent cuts, enabling The Lotus Flower to sustain the majority of its programs, even as the recent shutdown of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) sends shockwaves through the international aid sector.
The formal closure of USAID in July has left millions around the world with reduced access to food, healthcare and other vital services. In 2024, the agency earmarked $4.2 billion for the MENA region, including support for refugees returning from ISIS-controlled areas in Iraq, where over one million people remain displaced.
USAID funding has been central to providing access to safe drinking water, shelter and food for internally-displaced people in Iraq, as well as educational initiatives for women and girls.
“Unfortunately, before such projects are abandoned, states do not conduct any assessment of how the cuts will affect the survivors and communities,” said Dr. Ewelina Ochab, Senior Program Lawyer at the International Bar Association's Human Rights Institute (IBAHRI). “The Yazidi genocide is being treated as if it were a past event, and the community is safe now. This is far from the truth,” she added.
In the UK, cuts to foreign aid spending were announced in March, taking the country’s aid budget to its lowest in decades while Germany and France have also reduced their aid budgets in recent years.
“We have heard a lot about the cuts to USAID; however, the U.S. is not the only country to make such cuts. The UK reduced its foreign aid from 0.5 percent to 0.3 percent, despite previous promises to increase it back to 0.7 percent. By reducing foreign aid by 40 percent, vital projects will be abandoned. This will affect victims and survivors of horrific atrocities,” Ochab said.
In June, The Lotus Flower was forced to cancel the child protection program, which had been running since 2014 — when the Yazidi population was first displaced by ISIS. The program, which has been managed by The Lotus Flower in partnership with UNHCR since January 2023, worked to protect children from violence and abuse, supporting 3,432 individuals in 2024 before funding was withdrawn.
Shoresh worries the cuts will shrink their funding pool as organizations look to rely less on governments. But she also believes there may be more opportunity to continue her work through local donors.
In 2016, some of the world’s largest aid providers signed the Grand Bargain, pledging to allocate 25 percent of global humanitarian funding to local actors. Progress has been slow, with just 0.6 percent of funding going directly to local and national actors in 2023, according to Development Initiatives. However, the current funding crisis has intensified demands for change, with over 700 organizations signing an urgent letter to calling for a more equitable distribution of aid.
As global attention pivots to newer conflicts — from the 16-month-long war in Gaza to mounting gender apartheid in Iran and Afghanistan — the long-term recovery for Yazidi communities remains incomplete. While community-based organizations like The Lotus Flower offer rare stability, experts warn that without sustained political will and long-term investment, recovery efforts will remain patchwork at best.
“Increasingly, support for survivors of captivity is being subsumed into wider support programs for the IDPs. Many of these support programs are geared towards upskilling individuals, and return to Sinjar – which individual survivors may or may not find useful, but they’re not targeted support,” said Dr. Becky Jinks, Senior Lecturer in Modern History at Royal Holloway, University of London.
Progress is hindered by the situation in Sinjar, where a long-running dispute over control has stalled reconstruction and prevented many Yazidis from returning. Around 400,00 Yazidis fled their homes in 2014 and over 200,000 remain in displacement, primarily in tented settlements, despite a push by Kurdish regional authorities to send people home.
“A number of survivors told me that life in the IDP camps feels like a continuation of their time in captivity. They’re in limbo – unable to integrate properly into KRG, vulnerable to renewed hate speech and attacks, living precarious lives in fire-prone tents, waiting for news of relatives still in captivity, and afraid to return to Sinjar because of safety concerns and the physical destruction of the area,” Jinks said.
The Lotus Flower is one of several organizations still operating in a landscape increasingly marked by donor fatigue, political neglect, and stalled reconstruction efforts. Nevertheless, they continue to tailor support for women like Basma Yousif, 36, whose home was destroyed when ISIS stormed Sinjar in 2014. Terrified, she fled to the mountain, but after eight days with little access to food and water, and concerned for her eight-month-old daughter, the family travelled through Syria to reach the Kurdistan region of Iraq.
The years that followed were difficult and Yousif found herself experiencing episodes of rage. She couldn’t sleep and struggled to look after her children. After a home visit from The Lotus Flower, she was admitted to their psychosocial support program in 2024. “I feel better and closer to my children. I’m really grateful for their help,” Yousif said.
Especially, she added, when the rest of the world has turned its back on the Yazidi community. “It’s been more than 12 years and we are still living in the camps. We have been forgotten by international NGOs and foreign countries.”
A few members of her family have gone back to Sinjar, but the situation there remains unstable, with different factions competing for control over contested territory. Still haunted by the memories of ISIS in her village, Yousif is waiting for a time when it feels safe to return.
“We’re grateful for what Kurdistan has done for us but I hope that one day there might be justice and we can go back to Sinjar and restart our lives.”