ISIS's genocidal attack on the Yezidi population in northern Iraq in 2014 brought the world's attention to the small faith that numbers less than one million worldwide. That summer ISIS massacred Yezidi men and enslaved women and children. More than one hundred thousand Yezidis were besieged on Sinjar Mountain. The US began airstrikes to roll back ISIS, citing a duty to save the Yezidis, but the genocide is still ongoing. Today, over 3,000 Yezidi women and girls remain in the Caliphate where they are bought and sold, and passed between fighters as chattel. But many others have escaped or been released. Otten bases her book on interviews with these survivors, as well as those who smuggled them to safety, painstakingly piecing together their accounts of enslavement. Their deeply moving personal narratives bring alive a human tragedy and challenge common perceptions of Yezidi female victimhood. "An intelligent and perceptive book about one of the great tragedies of our age. It is also an inspiring story of resistance and survival that everybody should read." — Patrick Cockburn Otten's searing chronicle of ISIS' genocide of the Yezidis is compelling and devastatingly necessary." — Sareta Ashraph, former Analyst, UN Commission of Inquiry on Syria "Told with great care but with neither sentiment nor sensationalism, With Ash on Their Faces, needs to be read by all those who care about justice? and by those too occupied with global power to care." Lyndsey Stonebridge, author of The Judicial Imagination About the Author: Cathy Otten is a British writer and journalist based in Iraqi Kurdistan. She writes for a range of publications including the Independent, Newsweek, BBC, TIME, Vogue, Politico, Monocle, the Guardian and the Telegraph. She is a regular commentator on TV and radio, talking about Iraq and the war with ISIS |