Slaves of the Caliphate
Slaves of the Caliphate
The kidnapping, rape and murder of the Yazidi women of Iraq drew the
world’s attention to the brutality of Isis. Mariane Pearl is now
working with the women as they tell their chilling stories. Some of
those who managed to escape were photographed in traditional dress and
interviewed by Seivan M Salim
Mariane Pearl, interviewed by Christina Lamb, was in London earlier this month to launch a short film of interviews with Yazidi women, the ancient religious minority targeted by Isis last year. It was the plight of these women, trapped in the mountains of northwest Iraq after their husbands, sons and brothers had been slaughtered in their thousands in August last year, that alerted the world to the horrors of Isis.
Forced out of their homes in the city of Sinjar, tens of thousands of Yazidis
fled to Mount Sinjar, living in desperate conditions while they waited to be
rescued. Last year, UN researchers estimated that 7,000 Yazidi women were
taken by Isis and as many as 5,000 men had been killed. Mariane Pearl, interviewed by Christina Lamb, was in London earlier this month to launch a short film of interviews with Yazidi women, the ancient religious minority targeted by Isis last year. It was the plight of these women, trapped in the mountains of northwest Iraq after their husbands, sons and brothers had been slaughtered in their thousands in August last year, that alerted the world to the horrors of Isis.
Last month, Kurdish and Yazidi fighters, backed by US and British airstrikes, managed to expel Isis from the city, but many Yazidi women and girls remain in the hands of the Islamist militants. They are being systematically raped and bought and sold as slaves.
The photographer Seivan M Salim had heard that some had escaped to a camp in Zakho, in Iraq. She interviewed the women there and took their portraits in traditional white Yazidi wedding dresses. Some, with the help of NGOs, managed to move to Germany; others remain in the camp. These are some of their testimonies. Their names have been changed.
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Above: Syhan, 30 years old,captured for 10 months
“I got pregnant during my captivity by Isis and escaped when I was in my eighth month. I stayed in Turkey for two months until the baby was born. I came back to northern Iraq, but wasn’t able to bring my baby with me from Turkey. I don’t know where he is”
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Dlo, 20 years old, captured for 8 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”
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Rooba, 28 years old, captured for 10 months
“They brought us to Raqqa. There were about 300 of us girls there, in a big
hall. All the women had babies, who cried because they were so hungry. The
first night, nine girls tried to flee. They tied their clothes together to
make a rope and lowered themselves out of the window, but the Isis fighters
found them and brought them back. They hit all of us because we didn’t tell
them about their escape. They put us all in a big room, locked the door and
didn’t give us any water.
One day, they brought us to another building. On the front was written something like ‘area for selling’, and there I was sold to a 40-year-old man from Saudi Arabia. He asked me to marry him, and when I refused, he pointed to three objects sitting on his table — a knife, a gun and rope. He said he’d use all three if I didn’t say yes. I refused over and over again, so he beat me. He beat my niece, who was only three years old”
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Qaliya, 21 years old, captured for 10 months
“When I was in Mosul I tried to flee by running to the Sinjar Mountains. They took me back to my captor’s house, where he pushed me inside a room, closed the door and started to whip me. After that he hit me with a cable and then fastened my legs and hung me by the legs to the fan on the ceiling and then started to hit me again. He took me down and told me that my punishment would continue for three days, and I would have nothing to eat or drink. He also told me that if I ran away again he would tie me to two cars and then split me in two. Three days later he let me out of the room”
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Shirin, 22 years old, captured for 7 months
“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 four 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”
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Nasima, 22 years old, captured for 9 months
“In Mosul, sheikhs 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, Bashiqa, 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. 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. 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”
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Amal, 18 years old, captured for 11 months
“They took all of us, 14 members of my family. They took us to Sinjar and then Tal Afar. The fighters were scared of coalition airstrikes, so kept moving from town to town around Mosul. After six months they took me back to Tal Afar. The worst thing I saw was the killings in Sinjar. There were many corpses on the road, it was terrible. The saddest thing I remember during those terrible months was a 12-year-old girl — they raped her without mercy”
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Shadi, 18 years old, captured for 5 months
“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 had lied, he beat me. He tied my hands with a cable and raped me”
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Muna, 18 years old, captured for 4 months
“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”
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Delvin, 27 years old, captured for 4 months
“They separated the women from the others and brought us to a school, where we stayed for two months. Then they moved us to several different places, I don’t know exactly where. At last we arrived in Raqqa, in Syria. After 12 days, they sent me to a Syrian family. I was pregnant and I had other children with me. They were very cruel to us. Even though I was pregnant they would beat me and try to have sex with me. If I didn’t accept to have sex with the men of the family, they would force me anyway. They raped me over and over again. I was sold again, this time to a family from Saudi Arabia. They took one of the boys who was with me to be trained as a jihadi. I never saw him again. I stayed there for a month and a half. I moved again to another city, where my baby was born. I was raped there, too, despite the fact that I had just given birth”
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The BBC's Arabic Service follows a young woman as she negotiates to free
Yazidi women being held captive by Islamic State fighters in Northern
Iraq.
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