Recounting her ordeal, she said on August 3, as the sun rose over her village, Tel Uzer, a quiet spot on the western Nineveh plains of Iraq, they got alert from relatives that members of ISIS were coming for them and they quickly fled out of the town on foot, taking only clothes and some valuables, Washington Post reports.
They stopped to drink water
from a well in the heart of the desert after about an hour of trekking.
Suddenly, they found themselves surrounded by militants wearing Islamic State
uniforms. They were divided into groups, based on their gender and age.
She said: “One for young
and capable men, another for girls and young women, and a third for older men
and women. The jihadists stole cash and jewelry from this last group, and left
them alone at the oasis. Then they placed the girls and women in trucks. As
they drove us away, we heard gunshots. Later we learned that they were killing
the young men, including my 19-year old brother, who had married just six
months ago.”
They were taken to an empty
school in Baaj, a little town west of Mosul near the Syrian border, where they
met many other Yazidi women who had been captured by Islamic State. They were
told to recite the Muslim creed – “I testify that there is no God but Allah, and
that Muhammad is his prophet” – which would make them Muslims but they refused,
which got the Islamists furious.
“Every now and then, an
Islamic State man would come in and tell us to convert, but each time we
refused. As faithful Yazidis, we would not abandon our religion. We wept a lot
and mourned the losses suffered by our community,” she explained.
One day, the married women
were separated from the unmarried ones. She and her childhood friend were given
as gifts to two Islamic State members from the south, near Baghdad. The men
drove them to their home in Fallujah.
The man she was given to,
nick named Abu Ahmed, tried to rape her several times, but she did not allow
him to touch her in any sexual way, prompting him to beat her every day,
punching and kicking her to the point that she and her friend started to
consider committing suicide.
On how they managed to
escape, she said on the sixth day after their arrival in Fallujah, Abu Ahmed
left for business in Mosul and in the evening the next day, Abu Hussein, the
man her childhood friend, Shayma (fictitious name) was given to, went to the
mosque for prayers, leaving them alone in the house.
They quickly made a call to
a friend of Shayma’s cousin, Mahmoud who lived in Fallujah, for help. They then
broke the locks of the doors using kitchen knives and meat cleavers. Wearing
traditional long black abayas they found in the house, they walked through the
town which was quiet for evening prayers until Mahmoud came and picked them up
on the street and took them to his home.
The next morning, he took
them on a two-hour ride to Baghdad, after giving them fake student IDs in case
they were stopped at checkpoints. In Baghdad, they met with Yazidi and Muslim
Kurdish family friends who helped them procure another pair of fake ID cards
that enabled them board a flight to Irbil, the capital of Kurdistan in the
north.
“After staying in Irbil
overnight at the house of a Yazidi member of the Iraqi parliament, Vian Dakhil,
we travelled north to Shekhan, to the residence of Baba Sheikh, the spiritual
leader of the world’s Yazidis,” the girl recounted.
Expressing joy over her
freedom, she said: “After so much fear for so many days, hugging my dad again
was the best moment of my life. He said he had cried for me every day since I
disappeared. That evening, we went to Khanke, where my mother was staying with
her relatives. We hugged and kept crying until then I fainted. My month-long
ordeal was over, and I felt reborn.”
According to the girl, she
still has nightmares and wants to leave the country altogether. She said: “This
country is no place for me anymore. I want to go to a place where I might be
able to start over, if that is even possible.”
Poor girl
ReplyDeleteSome girls really suffer feel so sorry
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