The testimony of Fr. Cassar.

Fr. Joseph Cassar, a Maltese Jesuit, who has been in Iraq for 6 years, is responsible for the Jesuit Refugee Service there. His staff in Erbil consists of 12 people, with a further 136 working in the various cities. Among the services offered are accompaniment, education, mental health and psychosocial support. The number of those who make use of these services is 27,426.

In Kurdistan Iraq, Yazidi men, women and children managed to escape and saved their lives from the ferocity of the Islamic State who, in 2014, began to persecute their religious community by erasing it from Sinjar, the much-loved land in northern Iraq, on the border with Syria. For seven years they have lived in complete oblivion, forgotten by everyone.

There are just under 250 thousand Yazidi who are surviving in various refugee camps run mainly by volunteers from non-governmental associations. In Sharya, a city in the Duhok province, 17,000 have not even managed to set foot in a refugee camp. They live in dire need. The Jesuit Refugee Service in Iraq has for a long time offered them material support and psychological comfort.

The pain of not being able to return home

"The Yazidi cannot regain possession of their lands in Sinjar" explains Fr. Joseph Cassar "owing to the lack of security. In those places there are armed groups that are continually battling each other. The city of Sinjar and the villages around the district are destroyed. The houses are razed to the ground and some of them completely mined. "There is no electricity, drinking water, and not even a minimum level of health care".

The hope of solidarity

The mission of the Jesuits is to accompany these people and give them hope, "by visiting the families of the displaced, bringing material aid, restoring rights thanks to the intervention of a lawyer, giving education through a school for more than two hundred children and caring for the mental health of people suffering from an unsustainable existence.” In fact, there are many Yazidi who are so desperate that every year they try to take their own lives, and all this is taking place in a deafening general silence.