From the outside, the shelter looks like a disused old people’s home. Inside, it is more like a busy playgroup. Children with new backpacks queue in pairs against a wall covered in their artwork, waiting to be taken to swimming lessons; football and skipping competitions take place in the corridors while groups of women, babies on their laps, sit huddled together on their phones.
The shelter, in a sleepy village hundreds of miles outside Stuttgart, is one of several dozen that has opened across the German region of Baden-Württemberg since spring last year as part of a special-quota project designed to support some of the estimated 2,500 women and children who have escaped after being held hostage by Islamic State.
Security at the shelter is tight. The only clue as to who is inside comes when a teenage boy shouts instructions in Kurdish to a child attempting to ride a bike in the empty car park.
“These women and children have been enslaved by Isis, who believe they are their owners. They are victims and witnesses to war crimes, so we protect them by running our mission in a secret, secure way,” says Dr Michael Blume, the head of the programme.
The first women and children began arriving in Baden-Württemberg last March. As well as being one of Germany’s wealthiest regions, it is also home to a large number of the 50,000 Kurdish Yazidis, a persecuted minority group from northern Iraq. Last year, the federal parliament issued 1,100 resident visas on humanitarian grounds, and set up an office with a budget of €95m (£74m) to allocate places to women and children kidnapped by Isis.
In a number of murderous dawn attacks that began on 3 August 2014, Isis militants laid siege to the areas around the ancient city of Sinjar, displacing roughly 300,000 people and committing what the UN described as possible genocide against Iraq’s indigenous Yazidi population. Activists say more than 6,000 women and children were kidnapped by militants, many experiencing horrific abuse.
Kidnapped from Sinjar along with her two-year-old child while her husband was working in Duhok, Noor Murad, 25, was held hostage by Isis for 10 months. She was freed after months of negotiations and arrived in Germany in November.
“It has been overwhelming for me to come here. I have five brothers still missing so I am thinking about them,” she says through a Kurdish translator and German social worker.
While in Germany, Murad will receive intensive physical and emotional support. She was initially assessed by Dr Jan Kizilhan, the programme’s chief psychologist in Iraq. Having interviewed more than 1,200 former captives, his challenge, he says, was to create a trauma counselling programme that could be applied in multiple locations, in another language, for a “devastated group who have endured multiple genocides”.
Blume explains that the culture of psychotherapy is alien to most of the women and girls. “There is not such a focus on the self,” he says, “so we begin slowly, making the women feel safe and secure.”
An intensive orientation starts immediately after they arrive on a specially chartered plane from Irbil. There are free German lessons for all and strict school attendance is expected for those under 18. Many of the children were forced to attend indoctrination and light weapons training while captive, and few schools are operational in the internally displaced people’s camps where the hostages lived after escaping. Social workers are firm about allowing the women space from their childcare duties as part of their therapy.
The women are given a small stipend depending on their age and number of dependents, and they manage their own budgets “exceptionally well”, according to the head social worker at the shelter. The women shop for food, go out together to explore, and begin to navigate the daily demands of German life.
“Going from every day being locked up all the time – I just wanted to die when I was in the hands of Daesh [Isis],” Murad tells me. “Now I am comfortable and I enjoy my freedom. I can’t compare Germany to Iraq. It is very peaceful and quiet and very green. But how can I enjoy being here when I am without my family?”
Those with specific medical emergencies (complicated gynaecological issues or life-limiting disabilities, or those who had self-immolated) were prioritised for the scheme. All were assessed on the extent to which they were traumatised by their time as hostages, whether they could benefit from treatment in Germany, and whether they could adapt to life there.
“The future for the younger women will be better than the older ones, as they will be able to integrate easily and enjoy more freedom than would have been possible in Iraq,” says Kizilhan.
The timescale for psychological treatment is dependent on the individual. Several women have children still in captivity and are attempting to negotiate their urgent release, which clearly takes most of their energy.
The women arrive in Germany severely traumatised from their experience. Most have severe post-traumatic stress disorder, Kizilhan explains. But generally their physical health has been maintained by the basic services at the camps.
Salma, 17, from Sinjar, travelled to Germany with her 15-year-old sister and aunt from Zakho camp six months ago. She is enjoying the freedom of Stuttgart, but with guilt and sadness, and has been attending counselling since she arrived.
“I felt I was nothing when I came here, but I have been treated very well,” she says. If she stays in the programme her family, who urged her to go, can apply to join her in two years. “I had to have a lot of medical treatment and I have had counselling and social support. I have everything that I need.”
Salma’s family remain in Zahko camp, one of many under-resourced settlements around Duhok, but she is determined to bring them to Germany, as she says she never wants to return to Iraq, or “any Muslim country” again.
“I feel like I am stronger now – and the psychologist said I don’t have to have medicine any more. When I was in Iraq, I thought my life was over. I had no hope, even when I was free. It was still the end of my life. Now, I have a new life. I go to school. I learn German and I will study in the future.”
- This article was amended on 2 March 2016 to clarify that there are 50,000 Kurdish Yazidis in Germany, not just in Baden-Württemberg.