WUNRN
YAZIDI TEEN IRAQ GIRLS RECALL HORRORS IN ISIS CAPTIVITY
A
young Yazidi woman bides time in a refugee camp after fleeing
Teenage
girls who escaped the brutal clutches of
The
girls, members of the persecuted Yazidi minority from northern
“We
would try to make ourselves look ugly,” an escaped girl, 15, told the Global
Post news service. “Some women would cry or scream or fight, but it made no
difference. They were always taken anyway.”
She
said they were debased so badly that death, even by suicide, was more appealing
than living under
“One
girl hanged herself,” the teen said. “Another tried, but the
One of
the young victims said she became frail and sick because her guards gave them
so little to eat.
Their
captors also made them watch videos of beheadings of Yazidi men.
“In
some [videos] they put the heads into cooking pots,” the anguished victim
recalled. “Sometimes they would stand on them. There were so many heads. And
they would ask us, ‘Do you know this one?’ and laugh.”
Another
teen, a 19-year-old mother, said her ordeal began when she tried to flee from
her village in the Sinjar region of
‘One girl hanged herself. Another tried, but
the
The rebels executed boys as young as 14, she said. She watched as her husband
was shot to death.
Clinging
to her only child, the mother and other women were bundled into pickup trucks
and taken to a holding facility. There, they were pressured to convert to Islam
and given copies of the Quran.
“There
was a big hall with three floors and each floor had five or six rooms,” the
15-year-old said. “They told us if we didn’t convert to Islam, they would kill
all the men in our families, so we said to ourselves, ‘It’s just words. In our
hearts we are still Yazidi.’ So I did it to save my brother.”
She
and others managed to escape while their captors were away at prayers.
Those
assaults on Yazidis and other minorities — and in particular, the ISIS threat
against tens of thousands of Yazidis trapped in Iraq’s Sinjar mountains — led
President Obama to authorize airstrikes against ISIS in Iraq.
The
Bombers
from
Kurdish
troops said the RAF strikes helped them retake an “important border crossing”
at Rabia near the border with