Nemam Ghafouri

Nemam Ghafouri (25 December 1968 – 1 April 2021) was an Iraqi-born Swedish Kurdish medical doctor and practitioner. She was known for helping Yazidi victims of Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).

Early life Nemam Ghafouri was born on 25 December 1968 in the Chnarok region of Iraq (now the Kurdistan Region) to Mahmoud Agha Kaka Ziad Ghafouri, a Kurdish resistance commander, and Gulzar Hassan Jalal, who provided resistance fighters with food and ammunition. Ghafouri had 10 siblings and grew up near Tehran and in Naqadeh, in Iran's West Azerbaijan province. Ghafouri then studied medicine at the University of Pécs, Hungary, and at Umeå University in northern Sweden, earning a medical degree from the latter in 2001. Between 2001 and 2003 she studied public health at Umeå University. As a consequence she was one of the first aid workers on site in Iraqi Kurdistan when the ISIL attacked Sinjar. The Sinjar massacre marked the beginning of the exploitation and genocide of Yazidis during the War in Iraq and displaced hundreds of thousands of refugees. Ghafouri helped the refugees arriving wounded and traumatized at the border and made it her primary focus to help them. Ghafouri was an outspoken critic of the Swedish governments stance on actual and would be ISIL-members, accusing the government of inaction.

Death Ghafouri contracted COVID-19 in March 2021, while reuniting twelve Yazidi mothers with their children. She was then shifted to Stockholm, Sweden, for urgent medical attention.