Suhalia is a young Yazidi artist currently living in Australia. As the ISIS attack on Sinjar began on 3 August, Suhalia and her large family attempted to flee the area in a single car that soon broke down. Forced to walk, she and her family were quickly rounded up by ISIS fighters, and Suhalia’s ordeal began. Aged just fourteen at the time, she was separated from her relatives and taken to Mosul, where she was kept in sexual enslavement for three years. She was told that her family had been killed, and she began to make artworks of their images to bring their memories back to life. Although these pictures were immediately destroyed by her captors, she carried on drawing. The ISIS guards would take anything with which she could make images and on occasion even tie her hands to the prison bars.

Unable to paint the faces of the people she loved, she regularly attempted suicide to escape the pain. In response, the guards rubbed salt into her wounds to prevent her making further attempts. Suhalia was bought and sold as chattel between ISIS fighters on eight occasions. When international forces started to bomb ISIS positions in Mosul in 2017, Suhalia attempted to escape under the cover of their fire. She saw numerous friends killed in the blasts during these dangerous attempts, with which she persisted for two weeks. On 9 July 2017 she finally managed to escape, making her way to her uncle’s house and eventually to back to the rest of her family.

Suhalia is now twenty years old and has continued to make art to remember what she endured. Her drawings allow her to bring back the memories of the people she has lost in her life. Her untitled painting of a silenced Yazidi girl is based on the many she was imprisoned with who were beaten and tortured. It is a metaphor representing every powerless and voiceless survivor of ISIS violence. Suhalia wants to use her work to spread a message about what happened to her, and what more needs to be done.