Yazidi sex slaves share their real-life, tragic terror stories: Part II (WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT)

In August 2014, the northern Iraqi city of Sinjar was attacked by Islamic extremists. Over 5,000 Yazidi women were captured that month and forced into slavery. Since then, many have escaped with their lives but must live with horrific memories and, for some, with the children of their rapists.

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LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) - Fifteen Yazidi sex slave survivors have stepped forward to share their experiences at the hands of the ISIS militants who killed their families and used them over and over before selling them to other extremists who used and resold them. 

The women's stories appear on Daily Mail, where it is explained that Seivan Salim, an Iraqi female photographer, was able to find some of the women who escaped slavery. Each woman was pictured in a traditional white Yazidi wedding dress in a touching move to proclaim their purity.

"When they arrived it was night. They surrounded the city so we couldn't leave. They took all the men away, but we didn't know where. Then a thirteen-year old boy came back, covered in dust and crying. He told us that the men had all been killed, but we didn't believe him. The ISIS fighters gathered the young girls to one side. They took us to Tal Afar where we didn't have any food or water. 

"They moved us from place to place for weeks before taking us to Syria. In Raqqa we were put underground. It was so dark that I couldn't tell day from night. They wrote our names on papers around our necks, and sold us like that. Eight of us were sent to Aleppo and I ended up with another woman and my nephew in a large villa. 

"There was an American man there, who did not speak Arabic. He told me that I must marry him to become Muslim. He asked me to wash myself and then marry him. I told him that I was pregnant and could not have sex, so he brought me to a doctor and when he found out that I lied he beat me.

"He tied my hands with a cable and raped me. We tried to escape many times. Each time he would find us, aided either by the militia at the checkpoints, or people who lied to us and instead of helping us would call him. 

"Every time he'd beat us more and more. There were people in Aleppo, however, who were just trying to survive. I knew this, and I knew that I just needed to get lucky and find one. We tried and tried, until somebody helped us. We escaped, but still we don't know anything about my uncles, my cousins and my brothers."

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"ISIS forced me to go with them when I was in Tal Afar. They said, 'If you don't come with us we will behead your two young brothers.' So I went with a man to Mosul. I worked for his family as a slave. They forced me to convert to Islam. Even though he had a wife and a family he raped me continuously. ISIS still has five members of my family and I don't know where they are or if they're still alive."

DLO, who is twenty-years-old, was caught August 15, 2014 and was held against her will for eight  months:

"It was 11 in the morning when ISIS came to our village; we were making lunch. They came into our house, grabbed us and brought us to the school. They separated the men, women, and girls. We didn't know what was going to happen to the men. We didn't know that they would kill them all. 

"We were taken to Tal Afar along with other girls. ISIS militants would come to the house to select girls for their pleasure and take them away with them."

Twenty-two-year-old Nasima, who was also captured August 15, 2014, remained a slave for nine months before her escape. She described the horrors but remains grateful for the help she received:

"They came to us and said that they would leave us alone. Then they came and told us we had to convert to Islam otherwise they would behead us. They gave us time to think and then they came back again saying that they would let us go, but instead they brought us to a school, took our money and our possessions. They separated the men from the women and left us inside. Then we heard the shooting. We thought they were killing animals not our men. 

"In Mosul sheiks and emirs came and looked at us. They were buying us. I was sold to a man who took me to Tal Afar. When we arrived I was forced into marriage. That night he tied my hands and legs and he blindfolded me. Then he raped me. I never stayed long in one place: Mosul, Bashika, Baaj, Kojo, Sinjar. He kept moving around and he always brought me with him. I tried to run away twice, but he caught me and beat me for three days in a row. 

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"Sometimes I would go a whole week with no food, sometimes more. I was always locked inside a room as if I was in prison. I was in Mosul when I decided that I couldn't take it anymore and I needed to leave. I was scared, but I put on a black abaya and went in the streets. I got on a taxi, told the taxi driver I was escaping from slavery and begged him to help me. I was lucky because he helped me. He called my brother and asked to arrange a smuggler.

"My brother knew a driver in Mosul who he trusted and asked him to bring me to Badush where he would collect me. I was taken to the Peshmerga [Kurdish soldiers] and I was free. My two sisters and two brothers are still with ISIS. 

The first time a member of ISIS raped me, he hit me with a whip. He washed me and forced me to marry him. He was about 30 years-old and had four children. He wanted me to give him a baby. The man dealt with explosives and moved around a lot. I saw them placing mines in several different cities. When they heard an airplane they would send me out; they thought that if the pilots saw me they would not bomb them. I hoped they would."

Twenty-year-old Jihan was enslaved August 4, 2014, and remained a captive for ten months:
"They put me and fourteen other girls on a truck and they took us to Mosul. We were all young and pretty. We didn't stay in Mosul long; they took us to a small village where we stayed for fifteen days.

"The conditions there were terrible. They put us in filthy room and we all got sick. Then we were taken to Raqqa in Syria. They told us that we would be sold, some as slaves, some as brides for the fighters. It was hot, unbearably hot, and there were one hundred and fifty of us in a house without windows, without air. 

"One afternoon about twenty men entered the house and started beating us. They shouted that we were their slaves and we should obey them and do whatever we were told to do. They told us that they would punish us, but never kill us because they preferred to torture us."

Shirin, 22, was captured August 15, 2014 and was a slave for seven months:

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"My whole family was taken at night except for one of my brothers. They brought us to a school and took our phones, money, gold; everything. They put the women and children on a bus and we were taken to Mosul at night, to be sold. I was sold to a man who came from Albania. He lived together with five other families and I became the group's slave. 

"I was forced to clean, to pray like a Muslim and to have sex with all of them. I stayed with them for 4 months before they sold me again, this time to a family in Syria where I had to take care of the children. 

"After two months, I decided to flee. I covered myself in black and left the house. On the way I asked for help from a stranger in the streets. I was lucky. They brought me to a house where I could call my brother. He managed to get money from an NGO and I was smuggled through the border into Turkey. My family is still somewhere in ISIS territory."

Maysa, who is only eighteen and was captured August 3, 2014 and was enslaved for ten months, said:

"We were farmers and had a large piece of land that we all looked after. In the village half of us were Muslim, the other half Yazidi. I was in love with a boy from the village and we wanted to get married. I don't know what happened to him after ISIS arrived.

"At three in the morning we heard the first gunshots and then airplanes flying. By morning we realized that every Yazidi family was gone. Only Muslim families were left. We ran to our neighbor and borrowed his truck to leave the village. We set off toward the mountain, but ISIS fighters stopped us on the way. They were from different countries, not only from Iraq: Pakistan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia. They told us to get out of the truck. The road was full of corpses; they killed many people. 

"They separated the girls from everyone else and brought us to Baadj in their jeeps. My mum tried to come with us, but they hit her with the butt of a gun and knocked her down. We didn't eat for three days; we only cried. They told us not to be afraid, that they would not hurt us. They had a problem with the government they said, not with the people.

"Then they brought us to Badush prison. It was dark and packed with people. I found my uncle's wife and she told me that she didn't know if my mother was there. I spent the night looking for her among the many women and finally found her in the morning. I held her tight for those few hours before they took her away again. They separated the young girls and brought us to Mosul. 

"In Mosul we were inside a two-storey building, five hundred of us. A sheik came. He had a stick in one hand and a book in the other. He had come to convert us to Islam. We said the words he asked us to say and according to the man we were now Muslim and had to go with them. One morning at five they picked us up, forced us to put on black abayas, chained our hands, blindfolded us and forced us on to a bus. 

"They drove for twelve hours until we arrived in Syria. We stayed in a prison for two days and on the third day they brought us to a mosque and left us under the sun like animals. We were like sheep in the bazar. The sheik called the men to come and see us, and choose between Yazidi and Christian girls. The men did not want the Christians though; they all wanted us, the Yazidi girls. 

"One man chose me and put me in a car. I was in his house for three months. At first he wanted to 'purify' me from being Yazidi and forced me to give up my rings, my clothes and all those things that recalled my religion, my identity. He wanted to 'teach me how to behave' so I was taken to live with other Yazidi girls who had been forced to marry men from Saudi Arabia. They told me that I had to marry him, even if I did not want to. 

"Then my owner came back to collect me and I started working in his house. The television was always on religious channels, reciting the Quran all the time. I did not eat their food, only bread and water. One time, when I refused to wash, he hit me with his gun and told me that he would beat me to death if I did not wash myself. But I did not want to wash because I knew that if I washed he would sleep with me. I did not wash for three months. 

"I tried to escape once, but the soldiers found me in the streets and brought me back. The man beat me hard and whipped me with an electrical cable. He told me that if I did not want to stay there and marry him he would sell me to somebody worse. He gave me three days to think about it. The next day, when he was not there, his wife came to me and told me that she could help me escape to a Kurdish family living in the neighborhood. 

"She took me there when her husband was out and I asked the Kurdish family to help me; I begged them. But they were scared because even though they were Muslim, they were still Kurdish and could not hide me there without great danger. My captor eventually found me there. He beat me and shaved my hair off. I asked him to sell me to the Kurdish family; again I begged him. He told me that I would be forced to marry a Kurdish boy, but if this was what I wanted he would sell me to them. 

"I was sold for $1,500 and went to live in their house. I cried when I saw the woman because she reminded me of my mother. She cried too. They told me that they had bought me for my own safety, not to become their slave. I stayed with them for 5 months. Then one day we were able to arrange a rendezvous with my father at the Turkish border. The Kurdish man gave me his daughter's ID and drove me to the border where I was finally rescued."

The women who allowed their personally horrific stories to be publicized here represent thousands of women across the Middle East who have fallen prey to the Islamic extremists. Their bravery has spread awareness of the ongoing persecution and sexual slavery in ISIS-dominated territories. Please pray for a miracle and for ISIS to fall on its knees before the Almighty, who has promised to take revenge on any who stand against Him and His believers.

To read the first part of this series, please click here.

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