USA - Free Yezidi Foundation USA, Inc

Ms. Pari Ibrahim, is the Founder and Executive Director of the Free Yezidi Foundation (FYF). Ms. Ibrahim is Yezidi and originally from Iraq. She fled Iraq as a child with her family in 1991 during the Saddam Hussein regime, eventually settling in the Netherlands. Ms. Ibrahim created the Free Yezidi Foundation to provide support for Yezidi survivors in the aftermath of the Yezidi Genocide perpetrated by ISIS. The Foundation’s fundamental values include women’s rights, justice for gender-based violence and sexual violence, and the rights of ethno-religious minorities. Ms. Ibrahim and FYF have tackled some of the most difficult cases, particularly in defense of Yezidi women.

Ms. Ibrahim seeks an Iraqi society where Yezidis are considered equal and enjoy equal access to opportunity and rights. Similarly, she advocates for women’s empowerment and equal rights for women and girls in Iraq. Ms. Ibrahim is an advocate of heightened attention to and appreciation of gender issues in the Yezidi community, and seeks respect and acknowledgment of women’s rights in the broadest sense.

Ms. Ibrahim established FYF in August 2014 in the Netherlands. The Foundation has implemented programs funded by the United Nations, the United States Government, European governments, and various foundations and international organizations. On behalf of the Foundation, Ms. Ibrahim has spoken at the United Nations Security Council, British Parliament, US Holocaust Museum, BBC, Al-Jazeera, and at countless universities, media outlets, and think-tanks.

After the ISIS attacks on Sinjar and the Yezidi population in August 2014, Ms. Ibrahim founded the Free Yezidi Foundation to help Yezidi civilians in need and raise awareness of their plight. She has been active in organising protests and outlining the challenges facing Yezidis, with articles appearing in the Washington Post, Telegraaf, Al-Monitor, the Guardian, the Sunday Times (UK), Middle East Eye, and others. Ms. Ibrahim and her team established the FYF women’s and children’s centers, the FYF justice project, FYF’s Enterprise & Training Center, the combating GBV office, and various other projects, also conducting general advocacy to promote greater humanitarian and human rights support to Yezidi civilians.

Ms Ibrahim studied law at the University of Amsterdam. She speaks Kurmanji, Dutch, English, and German.

Arthur Aaronson is a Vice President of State Street Global Advisors and a Portfolio Manager in the Global Fixed Income Solutions group focusing on Tax Exempt and Taxable Municipal securities. Mr. Aaronson joined State Street in July 2016 through its acquisition of GE Asset Management (“GEAM”). He was a Portfolio Manager in the Insurance Asset Management Group prior to assuming his role on the Municipal team. He joined GEAM in 2002 as an Assistant Portfolio Manager. Prior to GEAM, he spent 11 years at the Princeton Insurance Companies as Vice President of Investments. Previous to his tenure at Princeton, he was Chief Financial Officer for Propac Underwriters and spent several years at Pannell Kerr Forster, a national public accounting firm. Mr. Aaronson has a Bachelor of Science in Accounting and Law from Clarkson University and is a Certified Public Accountant and a member of the Pennsylvania Institute of Certified Public Accountants. Mr. Aaronson has served as a commissioner on the Town Of Ridgefield Pension Plan since 2008.

Nienke Grossman is a Professor of Law and Co-Director of the Center for International and Comparative Law at the University of Baltimore School of Law, where she teaches Civil Procedure, International Law, and Women’s Human Rights. She is a frequent commentator and writer on international courts and tribunals, judicial selection procedures, and women and international law. She has presented her work widely, including at the annual meetings of the American Society of International Law (ASIL) and the European Society of International Law, the Harvard-Stanford-Yale Junior Faculty Forum, the University of Cambridge’s Lauterpacht Centre, before the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women in Geneva, and at side events during International Law Week at the UN in New York and the International Criminal Court’s Assembly of States Parties. In 2019, Grossman was elected to a three-year term as co-chair of the Women in International Law Interest Group (WILIG) of the American Society of International Law (ASIL), where she also served as co-chair of the 900+ ASIL International Courts and Tribunals Interest Group (2014-2017). In 2017, she was appointed to an Independent Panel of Experts to evaluate candidates to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and to make recommendations for improving selection procedures. In addition, Grossman has provided legal advice to Latin American states in cases before the International Court of Justice. Prior to joining UB Law, Grossman was a Research Fellow at Georgetown University Law Center, an Associate in Foley Hoag LLP’s international litigation practice, and a law clerk to U.S. Federal District Court Judge Gerald Bruce Lee, in the Eastern District of Virginia. She is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School, and has an LLM from Georgetown University Law Center.

Nibras Khudaida was born and raised in a small Yazidi village in Nineveh, Iraq. Nibras is a refugee and arrived in the United States after the ISIS attacks in 2014. She is currently a Junior at Creighton University, studying economics and international relations. Nibras hopes to pursue International law post-graduation where she can advocate for human rights and education. Since arriving in the United States, she completed her high school diploma, enrolled in and is nearly completing college, and has worked or interned at the Iraq Mission to the UN, the United States Congress, and was chosen by the Malala Fund as an advocate. She has already spoken at the United Nations about the importance of girl’s education. Nibras is a young leader in the field of minority and women’s rights and education.

Naomi Kikoler is an expert on conflict and mass atrocity prevention. She leads the Center for the Prevention of Genocide at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum policy engagement with the United States government, Congress and the United Nations. Previously she led the Global Center for the Responsibility to Protect’s global policy and advocacy work, including its UN Security Council advocacy on crisis situations. She is currently leading a project on Iraq and the Islamic State to assess threats and craft policy recommendations for civilian protection. Her 2015 report on ISIS’ atrocities helped to galvanize the US government’s to recognize ISIS’ commission of genocide against religious minorities. A leading strategist, Naomi is a lecturer on international human rights advocacy at the New School University, a board member of the Canadian Centre for R2P, and an adviser to NGO’s working on atrocity prevention. Prior to joining the Global Centre in 2008, Naomi worked on national security law and policy for Amnesty International Canada. She has also worked for the UN Office of the Special Advisor on the Prevention of Genocide, UN International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, the Brookings Institution’s Project on Internal Displacement and as a Carter Center election monitor in Kenya. Naomi is a graduate of McGill’s Faculty of Law, Oxford University and the University of Toronto. She also loves East African markets, Kurdish food, all things Canadian and is finally learning how to run.

Naomi joins the Free Yezidi Foundation board strictly in a personal capacity, advising FYF leadership on a number of objectives regarding the pursuit of justice, international and domestic legal options for survivors, and advocacy strategies.

Alex Lourie is a photojournalist from the United States. His career in conflict journalism began in Mosul, Iraq in 2016, where he worked as a videographer during the campaign to expel ISIS from the city and the surrounding areas. During this time, Lourie began building bonds with Yezidi leaders and related NGOs.

In 2018, Lourie covered the fall of ISIS’ so-called “caliphate” in Baghuz, Syria. During this trip, he was diagnosed in Kurdistan with stage-four cancer. After undergoing a successful treatment program in the US, Lourie returned to Syria in the fall of 2019. During this time, he covered the Trump administration’s perceived abandonment of the United States’ Kurdish allies and the resultant Turkish cross-border offensive.

Lourie’s latest projects have included covering the war in Donbass in Eastern Ukraine (2019); the violent demonstrations in Baghdad (2019); and the COVID-19 pandemic’s effects on U.S. citizens in New York City and Washington, D.C. (2020). Alex studied at Emory University in the United States.

Gay Rosenblum-Kumar worked with the United Nations for 25 years, and in her last post leading the Secretariat of the UN Interagency Framework Team for Preventive Action (FT), an informal, interagency mechanism that supported UN Headquarters agencies and Country Teams to deepen their work in conflict prevention and transformation. In that capacity, she played a major role in developing new conceptual and operational approaches to early conflict prevention policy and practice in the UN system.

She has been involved in early warning, conflict analysis and response development, facilitation, capacity-building for mediation and dialogue, support to electoral violence prevention campaigns, and promoting conflict-sensitive policy and practice. Ms Rosenblum-Kumar has conducted educational and skills training workshops on conflict transformation for the UN at Headquarters, in field offices, for Pearson Peacekeeping Center in Canada and at a number of schools and universities. Since leaving the UN in July 2014, she is teaching courses on the UN and on peacebuilding at New York University, assisting the Nonviolent Peaceforce as a Senior Advisor for Advocacy and Outreach in NY, overseeing a research project on reconciliation in the Western Balkans, and working on an intergovernmental initiative to develop a knowledge network and resource centre on atrocity prevention and ‘dealing with the past’ after violence.

David Sklar is a political and humanitarian strategist, having spent most of his career focused on Northern Iraq. In the aftermath of the Yezidi Genocide perpetrated by ISIS in Iraq and Syria, David joined the Free Yezidi Foundation as a board member. David helped to develop FYF’s programmatic and institutional architecture from an emergency start-up to an established and operational NGO.

Prior to FYF, David was an advisor to the Prime Minister of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq for several years. In this capacity, he served in the KRG Department of Foreign Relations and the KRG Department of Media and Information. At the Foreign Relations Department, David worked with the Foreign Minister and staff members to support greater diplomatic presence in Erbil and foster humanitarian engagement and economic development in the region. At the Department of Media & Information, David advocated for increased governmental transparency and developed a governmental program for more open, public access to the employment market. In the Prime Minister’s office, he liaised with UN and foreign government representatives, members of the media, and KRG ministry officials, advocating for greater transparency in government and a more equitable distribution of resources and opportunities for citizens. He left the KRG shortly after the Yezidi Genocide in 2014.

David studied political science at the University of Cambridge.

Rebecca Tinsley is a former BBC journalist who founded Network for Africa, an NGO which provides training in trauma counseling to survivors of genocide and conflict. Following a visit to Darfur at the height of the killing, she also started Article 1, an NGO helping people fleeing the Sudanese regime. She was a trustee of the Bosnian Support Fund which helped survivors of the Balkan wars; a founding trustee of the Carter Centre in Europe, and was a member of Human Rights Watch’s London council. Rebecca writes about Africa, genocide, and development for several online publications. Her commercially-published novel, When the Stars Fall to Earth, takes place in Sudan.

Rebecca’s team visited the Free Yezidi Foundation in Kurdistan in 2018, training a brigade of women in counseling skills. She has a law degree from the London School of Economics.

www.RebeccaTinsley.com

Esther Portyansky is an attorney based in New York City. The daughter of refugees, she has always been interested in international affairs and the rights of persecuted minority groups. She has a BA in History from Yale College and a JD from Columbia Law School, where she studied transitional justice in domestic and international law as well as the laws and regulations governing nonprofit organizations and their boards. She is a trained mediator and has mediated in contexts ranging from small claims court to federal EEO discrimination claims. She also coached student mediators and jointly led mediation trainings for members of New York’s Civilian Complaint Review Board, federal judges and clerks, and participants from the United Nations. Portyansky was a Woodbridge Fellow with the Yale University Office of General Counsel and has worked for New York State Supreme Court Judge Arthur Engoron and U.S. Federal District Court Judge Roslynn Mauskopf. Most recently, Portyansky was an associate in the Private Funds and Banking and Credit groups at Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP. She is fluent in Russian and English, has previously been fluent in French, and is a beginner in Hebrew.