A British Jewish woman has spent the last decade in Kurdistan in northern Iraq, living in a ramshackle camp in order to work with Yazidi people who have been victims of ISIS, the Islamic state military group. And in an incredible twist of fate, she was helped to start her work by a Holocaust survivor.
London-born Lisa Miara’s story is extraordinary, the more so because her entire project is precariously funded through an American-based charity, Springs of Hope Foundation, and she says that since 7 October 2023, Jewish money is going primarily to Jewish causes. “We tried to set up our charity in London,” she says ruefully, “but we were turned down because the work is in Iraq.”
But Miara is undaunted and in May this year is launching a groundbreaking three-day event in Ras Al-Khaimeh, in the UAE’s Al Wadi Desert, aimed at giving a voice to survivors of war and terrorism while brainstorming future solutions for the region. Miara says the UAE has “a pivotal role” in fostering regional recovery.
Miara — who once attended Britain’s Jewish public school, Carmel College — began her humanitarian work as a result of two terror attacks on one of her sons, when he was an IDF soldier. The first was in December 1998 and was an attempted lynching just outside Ramallah, when the then 19-year-old was brutally attacked.
“There was a lot of publicity about the attack,” Miara remembers — and in its wake she began to be contacted by large numbers of people asking for help and advice as to how to deal with the bureaucracy which follows a terror attack, from making sure that proper treatment was given by the relevant health group to registering for compensation or signing up for PTSD therapy.
“I told people, I’m drowning, I don’t know. But I began to collect phone numbers and do research as I looked for answers”. This took around four years — and then her second son was close to a 2002 triple terrorist bombing in central Jerusalem. Though not injured himself, he was profoundly affected by the deaths of all too many close family friends. Not long after that her first son, who had almost become a recluse after the Ramallah attack, was persuaded by the owner of Jerusalem’s Cafe Moment to come back to work.
It was March 2002 and Miara’s son was the duty manager when a Hamas terrorist bombed the restaurant, killing 11 people and injuring 54 more, 10 of them seriously. “Suddenly we were back in the ring of terror, now for the third time, and the second time with him”.
It was time, Miara decided, to make use of her research. “I grabbed a lawyer and friends. I said, we are opening a charity. We have to give some response. We cannot spend our lives hearing explosions, watching the streets being hosed down with blood, going to funerals. So from 2002 to 2015, we worked with widows and soldiers in Jerusalem — and it became the launchpad for Kurdistan”.
Around 2004 Miara met an American tax lawyer who had begun tracking the funding of terror, and she joined him in this work, pulling together survivors of Hamas terror to participate in a class action against the Arab Bank in Chicago. In 2014 the bank agreed to a confidential settlement with the plaintiffs, paying out “meaningful and very substantial compensation for their injuries”.
Faiza when rescued from ISIS
In August 2014 the Yazidi genocide began, described by Miara as a time when “12,000 people are taken from their beds, their homes, their work, into Syria and the captivity of ISIS — and nobody does a thing or says a word, because they are an irrelevant ethnic religious group in the corner of Iraq, of no value to major civilisation.”
Faiza today
At that point, though shocked and horrified at what had happened, Miara had no intention of doing anything. But in January 2015 her American lawyer friend said he was taking a team into Halabja on the south Kurdistan border with Iran. He planned to meet the victims of Saddam Hussein’s “Anfal” campaign against the Kurds, and to continue research about the funding and training of Palestinians under Saddam. The lawyer invited Miara to join this visit.
By the time of this invitation, Miara says a period of recovery had begun in Jerusalem for the victims of terror and she had decided her work with the charity she had set up had come to a natural conclusion. So she was happy to go to Kurdistan and see what was happening.
“As Jews”, she told her lawyer friend, “it’s incumbent on us… we need to visit the Yazidi community and see what’s going on”. With a clutch of dearly obtained permits to allow them through the checkpoints, Miara and her colleagues arrived at the Shariya camp, 40 minutes from the Turkish border and less than a hour to Syria.
Lisa Miara with a group of rescued boys all forced to be soldiers by ISIS
When she arrived at the place which was to become her home for the next 10 years, Shariya had only been open for three months. “All the infrastructure was new. There were 24,000 tent-dwellers there, all in total shock, all searching for families who were missing in ISIS. We met the camp manager, and he said to me, Madam, will you come and work here? If you come, I will give you land”.
They were introduced to some young girls who had been captured by ISIS and held in Mosul and Tel Afar, but who had managed to escape because in the first few months of the campaign against the Yazidi, ISIS were more interested in looking for weapons than in using the women as slaves or to sell them on.
Miara returned home “shocked and speechless” but not yet committed to further action. Several weeks later she was having coffee with a friend and describing what she had seen — and the bitter experiences of those who were trying to rescue women and girls from ISIS.
“We were talking and a man kept dragging his chair closer and closer, obviously listening to us.” Eventually he admitted that he was eavesdropping on the conversation — but asked for Miara’s phone number. Surprised, she gave it to him and the man called her not long after.
He said: “This is Rami, I was sitting near you in the coffee shop. My mother-in-law is a Holocaust survivor and she spent Shabbat with us. I told her what you were discussing and she asked how much it cost to ransom a girl from ISIS?” Miara said it would cost about $5,000. Rami’s mother-in-law provided $5,000 — and within three weeks, Miara had $20,000.
She went to Kurdistan to hand over this money to the rescuers, but even though she had no plans to do more, was able to meet some terribly abused Yazidi women who spoke of their treatment by their ISIS captors.
One member of the Springs of Hope staff with a special needs child enjoying equine therapy in Shariya camp in Kurdistan
By mid-2015 it was decision time for Miara as to how she was going to help the Yazidis. She moved to Kurdistan, now her main base. In the last 10 years, she has set up a number of groundbreaking programmes under the auspices of the Springs of Hope Foundation, including art and music therapy, an equine project of particular use to children with special needs, and supporting Yazidi, Syrian and Christian communities in northern Iraq — with the aid of 32 dedicated local staff.
Now Miara, who hopes her work with the Yazidis will become better financially supported, is focusing on organising the Tent Initiative in the UAE, held there because she says the country is “the core of Arab peninsula hospitality”. At least two survivors of the Nova Festival massacre of October 2023 will take part.
Clearly Lisa Miara is someone who makes things happen.
