The Missing

Sponsored Project

  • Hasan Oswald, Director/Producer
  • Fahrinisa Campana, Producer
  • Annelise Mecca, Producer
  • Stephen Nemeth, Producer
  • Alexander Spiess, Producer
a person in a thick jacket holds up a photograph of four children in front of an old building
Image ID: a person in a thick jacket holds up a photograph of four children in front of an old building

About the Project

After surviving kidnapping and enslavement by ISIS from 2014 - 2017, three orphaned siblings (Mediha, 15, Ghazwan, 13, Adnan, 10,) must now attempt to rebuild their lives. As the Iraqi government struggles to fund rescue missions five years after the Yazidi genocide, these children are crucial pieces of a larger puzzle for a network of local and international investigators trying to mount an international human rights abuse case, while also searching for their missing mother, father and baby brother.

The story takes place in four different locations—Kurdistan, Iraq, Turkey and Syria— and moves through time and space in order to be able to understand the atrocities of the past in context with the search for justice moving forward. Now, Mediha, a 15-year-old girl and the eldest sibling, spearheads one of the only active investigations in Iraq prosecuting ISIS perpetrators.