WUNRN
Yazidi Girls Seized by ISIS Speak Out After Escape
By KIRK SEMPLE
- NOV. 14, 2014
Website Gives Link to Video.
ISIS ‘Slave Market Day’ - In a video posted last month on YouTube, a group of men believed to be
Islamic State fighters are shown sitting in a room bantering about buying and
selling Yazidi girls on “slave market day.”
KHANKE, Iraq — The 15-year-old girl, crying and
terrified, refused to release her grip on her sister’s hand. Days earlier,
Islamic State fighters had torn the girls from their family, and now were
trying to split them up and distribute them as spoils of war.
The jihadist who had selected the 15-year-old as his
prize pressed a pistol to her head, promising to pull the trigger. But it was
only when the man put a knife to her 19-year-old sister’s neck that she finally
relented, taking her next step in a dark odyssey of abduction and abuse at the
hands of the Islamic State.
The sisters were among several thousand girls and young
women from the minority Yazidi religion who were seized by the Islamic State in
northern Iraq in early August.
The 15-year-old is also among a small number of
kidnapping victims who have managed to escape, bringing with them stories of a
coldly systemized industry of slavery.
Their accounts tell of girls and young women separated
from their families, divvied up or traded among the Islamic State’s men,
ordered to convert to Islam, subjected to forced marriages and repeatedly
raped.
While many of the victims are still living in areas of
northern or western Iraq under the control of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, many others have been sent to Syria
or other countries, according to victims and their advocates.
Five girls and women who recently escaped agreed to be
interviewed at the end of October. Four of them were in Khanke, a predominantly
Yazidi town in the far north of Iraq, and a fifth in the nearby city of Dohuk.
Tens of thousands of Yazidi refugees have sought refuge in this region, in vast
tent camps and in relatives’ homes, after fleeing their villages around the
Sinjar mountains.
The five victims consented to speak publicly only on the
condition that their names not be revealed for fear that the Islamic State
would punish their relatives.
At first, though, the 15-year-old felt differently. “I
want my name used because when the Islamic State reads it, it will be like a
revenge for me,” she declared at the outset of her interview, though she soon
demurred on the advice of a Yazidi advocate with her, only permitting the use
of her initials, D. A. The militants, she said, were still holding most of
her immediate family.
The Islamic State itself has openly acknowledged its
slavery industry. In an article last month in Dabiq, the group’s online
English-language magazine, the Islamic State said it was reviving a custom
justified under Shariah.
“One fifth of the slaves were transferred to the Islamic
State’s authority to be divided as khums,” a tax on war spoils, and the rest
were divided among the fighters who participated in the Sinjar operation, the
article said.
Yazidis follow a religion influenced by a medley of
faiths, including Zoroastrianism, Judaism and Islam. But the Islamic State
regards them as devil-worshiping pagans deserving of enslavement or death. By
forcing Yazidi women and girls to marry Islamic State members and become their
“concubines,” the article said, the group is helping to protect its fighters
against committing adultery.
In a video posted last month on YouTube, men purported to be Islamic State
fighters sit in a room and banter about buying and selling Yazidi girls on
“slave market day.” One says he will check the girls’ teeth. Another says he
will trade a girl for a Glock handgun. They discuss the relative value of girls
with blue eyes.
“Today is the day of (female) slaves and we should have
our share,” a fighter declares.
The Islamic State has kidnapped more than 5,000 Yazidis,
and possibly as many as 7,000, most of them women and girls, according to
Matthew Barber, a member of the Sinjar Crisis Management Team, an advocacy group
that has conducted an extensive survey of displaced Yazidi families.
Human Rights Watch, in a report released last month, said the systematic
abduction, abuse and killing of Yazidis might amount to crimes against
humanity.
“We’ve all been living these cases,” said Amena Saeed, a
former member of the Iraqi Parliament and a Yazidi who has been advocating on
behalf of the kidnapped.
The Yazidis’ communal ordeal began on Aug. 3 when the
Islamic State launched an attack on their villages in the Sinjar region,
driving thousands to flee into the nearby mountains.
D. A. was part of that exodus, traveling in a car
with her parents, five of her sisters and a niece. But their path was cut off
by militant fighters who rounded them up, along with other families, and took
them to a building in the town of Sinjar. There, the militants separated the
female Yazidis and young children from the men and boys, then later in the day
picked out the unmarried women and older girls, D. A. said.
“I was crying and grabbing my mother’s hand,” she said
during an interview at a relative’s house in Khanke, a Yazidi village near Mosul
Dam Lake. “One of the Islamic State members came and beat me and put a pistol
to my head. My mother said I should go so I wouldn’t be killed.”
Along with dozens of other girls, D. A. and two of
her sisters — one 19, the other 12 — were loaded onto a convoy of three buses
and driven to the Islamic State stronghold of Mosul.
D. A. and her two sisters were held in a house there
for nine days along with women and girls from other villages in the region,
then they were taken to a three-story building crowded with hundreds of
captives.
The building functioned as a kind of clearinghouse.
Islamic State fighters would stop by and take their pick of the girls and young
women. Some, perhaps in a reflection of their lower rank, would take only one
girl, while others took more, D. A. and other escapees said.
The man who chose D. A. “was wearing a beard, though
not a long one, and not very long hair,” she recalled. She refused to go at
first, holding on to her older sister. But the sight of a dagger at her older
sister’s throat convinced her to submit. Her 12-year-old sister looked on in
stunned silence.“She couldn’t talk, she couldn’t cry,” D. A. said. “It’s
like she had no feelings.”
That was the last time she saw her sisters.
Over the next several weeks she was moved at least eight
more times, among increasingly smaller groups of girls.
She was taken across the border into Syria. She remembers
spending a day in a white house, next to a lake, near Raqqa, Syria, where
Islamic State fighters engaged in another round of commerce involving the
girls. She saw men haggling, money trading hands. “It was like an auction,” she
recalled.
At that house, the girls were forced to shed their
clothes, bathe and change into conservative Islamic garb. Some of the girls
were as young as 11.
At one point, while she was being held in another house
near Raqqa, D. A. tried to escape along with five other girls. But their
attempt failed, and D. A., accused of being the ringleader, was severely
beaten and imprisoned.
She was released into the custody of yet another jihadist
who locked her in a house with several other girls.
The jihadist told them he was going to force them to
marry him at the end of the week. They could hear another group of girls living
in a different section of the house being taken away from time to time for sex.
None of the five escapees interviewed said they had been
raped while in captivity. But one said she had fought off a sexual assault, and
most said they had met other girls who had been raped, sometimes by several
men.
Several advocates said that even if the girls had been
sexually assaulted, they might never admit it, particularly not to a stranger.
Some advocates said they were concerned that the shame surrounding rape might
drive victims to suicide, though Ms. Saeed and other community leaders insisted
that there had been no suicide attempts among the estimated 150 Yazidi
escapees.
The threat of forced marriage led D. A. to consider
killing herself, but instead she decided to try another escape. Late one night,
she and another girl squeezed through a small window, and the two ran into the
darkness, eventually coming to a house in a rural area. They took their
chances, knocked on the door and a sympathetic-seeming young Arab man answered.
He took them to the house of a Kurdish family who then
contacted D. A.’s brother, arranged a meeting in a Kurdish area of Syria
and agreed that the girls’ families would pay $3,700 each to the Arab man for
his help. (They withheld details of the transaction, including the route
D. A. took out of territory controlled by the Islamic State, to protect
the identities of those involved.)
Asked why the Arab took the extraordinary risk of helping
the two girls, D. A. said, “I think he needed the money.”
That meshes with other accounts suggesting that a cottage
industry of for-profit rescuers has sprung up in response to the Yazidi girls’
abductions. One 19-year-old woman, the daughter of a Yazidi police officer,
said her family had paid a smuggler $15,000 to help her escape captors in
Aleppo, Syria.
D. A.’s parents are still in captivity — if they are
still alive — as are five sisters and her niece, relatives said.
Their absence, D. A. said, has left her feeling
bereft. During the day, relatives, relief workers and television provide
distractions. But at night, she said, when the house goes quiet and she is left
alone with her thoughts, that is when it hurts the most.
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