Nemam Ghafouri was born on Dec. 25, 1968, in the Chnarok area of Iraq (now the semi-autonomous Kurdistan area), one in every of 11 youngsters of Mahmoud Agha Kaka Ziad Ghafouri, a Kurdish resistance commander, and Gulzar Hassan Jalal, who relayed meals and ammunition to the fighters whereas elevating her youngsters.
Dr. Ghafouri grew up close to Tehran and in Naghadeh, in the West Azerbaijan province in Iran. Her household moved to Stockholm as refugees in the 1980s. She studied drugs at the University of Pecs in Hungary and at Umea University in northern Sweden.
In the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, she designed and carried out one of many first epidemiological surveys on danger components confronted by conflict-zone survivors.
Dr. Ghafouri engaged in wide-ranging reduction efforts in current years, together with missions to Iran to assist earthquake survivors. But her main focus since 2014 had been coping with the humanitarian disaster created by the ISIS takeover. Even after escaping ISIS, Yazidis had been left for months with no shelter and no coordinated reduction operations. Seven years later, greater than 150,000 stay in displacement camps.
“She didn’t think it would last for so many years, but the more involved she got, she couldn’t leave them alone without any help,” Nazdar Ghafouri mentioned of her sister. “She saw the disaster beyond the first emergency — food, water, medicine. Then she saw the catastrophe — all the life stories behind every tragedy.”
In addition to her sister, Dr. Ghafouri is survived by her mom; 5 extra sisters, Nergiz, Neshmil, Shilan, Chinar and Bijar Ghafouri; and three brothers, Diari, Ari and Karwan.
Dr. Ghafouri was evacuated to Sweden after contracting Covid-19 through the mission to reunite the moms and kids. On a ventilator, as her oxygen dropped to dangerously low ranges, she continued to put up political messages on Twitter earlier than she was transported.
