bild
[Note: full captions will be added on 3 March] Honar, age 8, in Sharia Village, Dohuk Province, Iraqi Kurdistan on April 20, 2019. Honer is 8. He was kidnapped in 2014, and his mother and father are missing. He says he was taught to use weapons and he saw ISIS fighters execute people. He also says he was beaten regularly by his captives. How does the human soul survive atrocity? After the horror of ISIS captivity, tens of thousands of Iraqis âÄ” many of them children âÄ” are caught up in a mental-health crisis unlike any in the world. Adam Ferguson photographed posed portraits of displaced Yazidi, a Kurdish religious minority group of some 700,000 people, most of whom lived west of Mosul in a district called Sinjar. He also photographed displaced ArabâÄ™s suffering from conflict associated trauma. He took these photographs at camps for displaced people in the Iraqi Kurdistan and in Nineveh Province, Iraq. There are 16 camps scattered around Duhok, a province smaller than Connecticut. At its peak, Duhok was home to nearly half a million people displaced by ISIS. Many have yet to return home. One camp in Mamasharn has a âÄœpsychosocial center,âÄ where graduate students are training to treat men and women who have survived atrocity. Earlier this year, Jan Kizilhan, a prominent Kurdish psychologist from Germany who oversees the program, was meeting with Midya, an 8-year-old Yazidi girl who used to faint some 20 times a day. Kizilhan said he frequently received calls from doctors in Canada and Europe wondering what to do about fainting among Yazidis, especially among the women who had been raped. âÄœThe women are always having dissociations,âÄ he told me. âÄœUsually because of a trigger, a smell, or they might see something in the paper. To avoid the rape in their minds, they might faint and fall down. They live with a feeling of unreality and detachment from the world. Trauma can devastate and reorganize autobiographical memory, making it hard for victims to feel safe in the present moment ( Adam Ferguson, for The New York Times Magazine) NO SALES, THIS MATERIAL IS FOR SINGLE USE PUBLICATIONS IN PRINT OR FOR A TEMPORARY ONLINE PUBLICATION, AND MAY BE USED EXCLUSIVELY TO PUBLICIZE THE 2020 WORLD PRESS CONTEST AND EXHIBITION. IT MAY NOT BE PUBLISHED AS PART OF AN ARTICLE OR ANY OTHER ITEM THAT CONTAINS NO DIRECT LINK TO WORLD PRESS PHOTO AND ITS ACTIVITIES. THE PICTURE MAY NOT BE CROPPED OR MANIPULATED IN ANY WAY. KEYSTONE PROVIDES ACCESS TO THIS PUBLICLY DISTRIBUTED HANDOUT PHOTO. THE COPYRIGHT IS OWNED BY A THIRD PARTY.