The fight is at times violent.
“We once charged some Iraqi Kurdish soldiers called Peshmerga with rape in the city of Shingal in North Eastern Iraq in the days before the Islamic State arriving to slaughter thousands,” recalls Kate Alsop.
“While those persons were eventually executed by their own people, a global group of terrorists beset doctors and nurses of The RINJ Foundation, smashing their homes, attacking them at work and setting upon the medical board of directors in cruel and astonishing ways.”
In Mosul, Iraq, where RINJ had set up warehousing and distribution for teams working in Syria, it was a surprise to some extent seeing Islamic State fighters chasing the Iraqi army from the city.
For the bizarre men who came from around the world to rape nine-year-olds in Mosul with impunity, something the Islamic State leader Abu Bakar al-Baghdadi decreed as a way to attract fighters, a growing underground resistance called the MuR began an insurgency to cause the freeing of those children and their older sisters.
That got violent.
Becoming proactive, the private security group that RINJ had engaged for its people’s protection cooperated with Coalition Forces in identifying bad actors and prosecuting threats before they were able to murder more innocents. Some good articles have been written that somewhat tell that story. But yes, it is a violent story. Many Islamic terrorist, genocidal rapists were massacred by women, some of whom would walk up to a car door, put a gun to the driver’s head and execute the person after unequivocally identifying the war criminal. Sadly, that woman died during a firefight near the Tigris River a year and a half later (Read In loving memory of Gila. Killed by ISIS in Mosul).
As activists fighting to remove from Facebook the videos of a Canadian girl being raped at a frat party the Foundation in its early days called itself the RINJ Campaign.
The group had been involved in helping families recover female teens who had been absconded to religious fanatic groups in Oklahoma and nearby US states.
“The young persons were being exploited for sex and labour,” says Katie. Some of those cases may still be ongoing in the courts as lawyers try to recover general compensation and ongoing medical rehabilitation costs.
Proactive Activists Get Good Results
RINJ literally set up observations and eventually intervened in the encampments on the children’s behalf under parental authority to get the kids back to their families.
The family would typically be notified of the plan and prior to an intervention would be brought to nearby accommodations so that the first person the children would see in the recovery process would be familiar loving family member.
A working relationship with psychologists and psychiatrists of the US-based CRC Health Group on some occasions brought survivors to cognitive therapy centers or addiction centers. The CRC Health Group began in 1986 as Sober Living By The sea.
The precursor activities of The RINJ Foundation included a response to claimants of FGM (Female Genital Mutilation) In The USA. Numerous approaches were used including the extraordinary effort to assist a claimant of refugee status in Canada.
The Canadian Refugee Board hearing judge admonished the claimant, a teen of 19, saying that there was “no way that a doctor in the United States would ever perform a Female Genital Mutilation procedure”.
In another case, a woman in her thirties who had been undergoing psychological therapy for inexplicable bouts of depression was helped by Canadian immigration officials who suggested an alternative method of entering the country. She followed that advise and has since undergone corrective surgery at University College Hospital in the United Kingdom.
“It is hard to define exactly what motivates activists and human rights defenders,” says Santiago of The RINJ Foundation. “But they are determined and insatiable people when it comes to helping their fellow men.”
“Some things are found to be common,” Santiago continued. “medical workers as human rights activists and clergy as human rights defenders. We see this all the time.”
Misogyny wars wherein only women and children suffer.
According to the two women, RINJ is currently active in combating:
- The reprehensible cruelty by their own governments and the sanctions of international community toward the citizens of all of Iran; the DPRK; Central America; the people of Venezuela and China.
- Oppressive regimes like the Houthis in Yemen; the Maduro Cartel and Junta in Venezuela; Bashar al-Assad in Syria; the Neẓām of Iran; and the military Junta of South Sudan.
- Worrisome regimes like that of Xi Jinping’s so-called Communist government which is shifting toward a totalitarian and murderous regime that may be dumping everything-positive China has achieved in the past decade. Its persecution of Muslims and the Falun Gong women, RINJ members in China say has not ended. The evidence is horrific.
- HIV/AIDS Which threaten every woman and child on Earth.
- Misogynists who kill females or rape females as a method of ending the race of people they belong to.
- “Antivaxxers” which the women describe as a cult that threatens the safety of women and children around the world.
- Men who commit the crime of incest and rape (which crimes have all directly destroyed lives and also accelerated the spread of HIV/AIDS).
- Soldiers and countries which use state military apparatus to attack and harm children and their civilian families. (Examples would be Myanmar, Iraq, Iran, The United States, Russia, Britain, France, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, South Sudan, Canada, Syria and Venezuela to name only a few.)
“The primary method RINJ uses for health care delivery in 2019 is private clinics delivering general health care to women and children as well as sections within general public clinics and hospitals through partner indigenous organizations,” notes Santiago.
Notes Katie, the same distributed health care progamme used in Iraq and Syria from 2013 to 2017 is being applied in Idlib, Syria since 2017.
“This denies combatants the easy opportunity to bomb big red crosses on their war maps because it is not revealed to anyone the location of central health care and medical supply repositories when mobile health care is delivered at the street level in communities. Stealth health care is the doctor bag and a pair of rugged shoes.”
“Thus far the Russians have bombed 18 hospitals and turned institutional health care into rat sh*t,” says Katie.
“They killed our colleague EMS worker Hossein and others we love. This knowledge of a serious war crime is not just going away,” she added with a strong voice.
