Shaghayegh Moradiannejad is a photographer and women’s-rights activist based in Vancouver.
The Yazidis are an ethnic and religious minority group from northern Iraq. They have faced centuries of persecution because of their beliefs, but their darkest chapter began in August, 2014, when Islamic State launched a genocidal campaign against them. As Islamic State swept through the area around Sinjar and other Yazidi homelands, 200,000 people were displaced, thousands were killed, and women and children were taken captive, enduring unimaginable abuse. In June, 2016, the United Nations officially recognized these atrocities against the Yazidi community as genocide.
In the aftermath, many Yazidi women marked their trauma on their own bodies with tattoos, created using a mixture of ash –the only resource they had during the winter as they burned wood to keep warm. Without proper tools, they used anything sharp they could find to scratch their skin, along with their blood and breast milk, to make the tattoos. These makeshift tattoos carry deep personal significance – names of loved ones lost, prisoner numbers assigned by Islamic State, or dates marking captivity and loss. Each tattoo is a scarred remembrance, a refusal to let the atrocities be forgotten, and a testament to survival.
Today, though these women have escaped Islamic State’s physical grip, they continue to live in psychological captivity, marked by loss and the challenge of rebuilding. Many live in UN camps or Khalsa Aid camps in the Kurdistan region near Duhok in northern Iraq. I hope this photo series, Ash Milk, brings attention to their enduring strength, the silent stories etched in their skin, and the resilience of a people determined to heal.
