"With Ash on Their Faces" by Cathy Otten

Audiobook version of Cathy Otten’s With Ash on Their Faces: Yezidi Women and the Islamic State, first published in 2017, read by Olivia Rose Barresi. Produced with the original publisher, renowned alternative publishing house OR Books, the audiobook will be released in late 2024.

ISIS’s genocidal attack on the Yezidi population in Northern Iraq in 2014 brought the world’s attention to the small faith that numbers less than one million worldwide. That summer ISIS massacred Yezidi men and enslaved women and children in the areas surrounding the Sinjar Mountains. While the armed conflict has ended and the headlines have moved on, thousands of Yezidi women and children remain in captivity - and many more are still displaced. This genocide is here conveyed with extraordinary intensity in the first-hand reporting of journalist Cathy Otten, who challenges common perceptions of Yezidi female victimhood by focusing on deeply moving personal narratives of resistance - those passed down over generations, and those here made new.