Kelley Eckels Currie, the US Secretary of State's Ambassador-at-Large for Global Women's Issues spoke to Rudaw's Hevidar Zana last week.
When asked by Zana what support the US administration is offering Yezidi and Kurdish women, Currie said:
"Since the beginning of the civil war in Syria as well as the rise of ISIS we've seen that women and girls have been extremely terrorized and have been the most severe victims of the crisis that has cut across Iraq and Syria, both in the terms of the refugees that have flown out of Syria and Iraq as well as those who are still in those countries suffering from abuses from extremist groups and then the challenges even after the extremist groups have been defeated, the challenges don't go away for these women."
"We've worked with Yezidi House, and we've worked with a number of other groups that specifically assist the Yezidi women and girls and the communities as a whole. Because the trauma affects the whole communities. And in order to help women and girls get able to return to these communities and we integrated into them that you have to address the border concerns of the community. So, we have been doing a lot of that through our assistance programs as well as through our diplomacy. And we've found the Kurdistan Regional Government to be a very good partner in this regard."
