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CALGARY | CANADA | 10/18/18 | At dinner, Jihan (29) what's app her youngest sister, Hudda (20) who is still stuck at a refugee camp in Iraq. The necklace she's wearing has the name of her youngest brother Munif. When Jihan was in Syria during her captivity, she took a needle and tattooed her upper body. She made the ink by blending ash with breast milk given to her from another captive. Tattoos are “haramâ€â€”forbidden in the Koran, ostensibly undesirable to members of ISIS. Jihan hoped these tattoos serve as a protective shield against ISIS, repellant to anyone who believes in their creed. Using the needle, she poked uneven block letters into her arms and across her chest, writing out the names of her missing family members: Hudda, her mother, her brothers, her sister-in-law who was pregnant in 2015 when they last saw her. Jihan’s fiancé’s name, Tahsen, is spelled out across her upper left chest above her heart, Jihan’s name beside it on the right. She has turned her upper body into permanent catalog of all the people she cannot locate. Jihan's family lost their home, community, way of life after being subjected to a brutal campaign of genocide, kidnap and rape by ISIS, beginning in August 2014. She has not seen her brothers, her mother nor her fiancé in more than four years. She acknowledges that it is unlikely they are alive. “Everyone could hear the guns,†she says, recalling the first hours in her village after men were taken from the women.
CALGARY | CANADA | 10/18/18 | At dinner, Jihan (29) what's app her youngest sister, Hudda...
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CALGARY | CANADA | 10/18/18 | At dinner, Jihan (29) what's app her youngest sister, Hudda (20) who is still stuck at a refugee camp in Iraq. The necklace she's wearing has the name of her youngest brother Munif. When Jihan was in Syria during her captivity, she took a needle and tattooed her upper body. She made the ink by blending ash with breast milk given to her from another captive. Tattoos are “haramâ€â€”forbidden in the Koran, ostensibly undesirable to members of ISIS. Jihan hoped these tattoos serve as a protective shield against ISIS, repellant to anyone who believes in their creed. Using the needle, she poked uneven block letters into her arms and across her chest, writing out the names of her missing family members: Hudda, her mother, her brothers, her sister-in-law who was pregnant in 2015 when they last saw her. Jihan’s fiancé’s name, Tahsen, is spelled out across her upper left chest above her heart, Jihan’s name beside it on the right. She has turned her upper body into permanent catalog of all the people she cannot locate. Jihan's family lost their home, community, way of life after being subjected to a brutal campaign of genocide, kidnap and rape by ISIS, beginning in August 2014. She has not seen her brothers, her mother nor her fiancé in more than four years. She acknowledges that it is unlikely they are alive. “Everyone could hear the guns,†she says, recalling the first hours in her village after men were taken from the women.