(John Murphy with Yezidi children; photo used with permission)
A West Seattle man is starting the New Year thousands of miles from home, working to help refugees who fled northern Iraq for Kurdistan. John Murphy is a Highland Park resident who, among other things, founded and leads The Cabiri. Right now, he is working to help Yezidi refugees, members of an ethnic minority forced from their homes by ISIL, which has targeted them with genocidal violence (here are reports from U.S. media and the BBC).
While nonprofit non-government organizations (NGOs) are helping some of the Yezidi refugees, others have taken shelter with relatives and sympathizers in towns around the region, and they are who Murphy is helping. We learned of his work via West Seattleite Lola Peters, who forwarded a message from Murphy that explains, “I’ve known Yezidi for two decades and have an ability to work within their culture. … The NGOs, although doing their best, they have lost people in the cracks. I am working with a private Yezidi collective to find needs, fulfill them, and mitigate hardships in the areas that have gotten (missed).”
Murphy has set up an emergency fund for the Yezidi refugees via this GoFundMe page, where you can read a short summary of his project. He also writes about it in-depth today at SeattleStar.net, noting, “Regardless of the largest refugee exodus since the Armenian genocide, few know exactly what is happening,” and concluding, “We in the West made this mess; let’s clean it up.” (While researching this, we happened onto a mention that U.S. military operations related to ISIL have cost $1 billion so far.)
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