Appeals by Yazidi Women Survivors of ISIS Sex Slavery Unanswered
"For six years we've been asking for help but no one is coming to help us. Unfortunately, there are only empty promises and false hopes." "As Yazidi survivors, we feel we're alone, everyone has forgotten us. We have the right to live like everybody else." "In my youth, I built big dreams and planned for a bright future. But now my future is lost and I don't know what will happen." Nesreen Rasho, 25, Mam Rashan refugee camp, Amman, northern Iraq
"Yazidis deserve peace and security, they deserve justice and accountability." "Survivors cannot wait another six years for the world to act." Nadia Murad, Nobel laureate, human rights campaigner
"We shouldn't have to keep asking for action. There is neglect from the international community and on the local level also toward survivors who are living in dire conditions." Saib Khidir, Iraqi parliamentary Yazidi representative
"I said [at the United Nations Yazidi massacre commemorative event] that if we don't act now, it may be too late, because ISIS fighters held in makeshift prisons in Syria were at risk of escape." "The escapes that we feared took place, with hundreds of prisoners reportedly walking free from ISIS camps last October." Amal Clooney, lawyer representing Yazidis
Dalal, left and Dilveen, right, reunite in northern Iraq, five years after they were torn apart at an ISIS slave market.
Living in refugee camps in northern Iraq, an unstable, frustrating existence, trauma is widespread among the survivors biding their time there. Nesreen Rasho had been taken to Syria, forced there to renounce her faith and adopt Islam, she was sold as a sex slave twice to ISIS men who abused her. When she attempted to escape her ordeal, she was severely punished, and contemplated escape from the reality of her victimhood by suicide.
Declining to give her name, a 31-year-old Yazidi woman at the refugee camp stated that "Some of my family members are still missing. Today we're still living in
fear and worry. We need safety and protection." Describing witnessing a relative being executed in the 2014 Sinjar attack by ISIS terrorists. Another woman, a teenage survivor living in another Iraq refugee camp suffered for five years in slavery following her abduction as a child, along with her mother and siblings.
Ronia estimated she had been sold over ten times during that time, recalling her mother beaten before her as she was forced to watch, helpless to react. The "most painful moment" in her life took place the day she was separated from her mother and siblings, each sold separately. "I had no idea where my mother was, was she dead?", 15-year-old Ronia said. Her final owner had allowed her to leave during a ceasefire, last year.
An internally displaced person (IDP) camp in Northern Iraq is home to 9,000 Yazidis.
She discovered later that her parents found asylum in Canada, planning herself to make application to join them there. At a UN event commemorating the massacre that took place at Sinjar mountain in Iraq, where the Yazidi community lived, lawyer Amal Clooney had asked the Security Council to bring ISIS to justice. A year has passed, with no action taken. Ms.Clooney had wanted the International Criminal Court to be authorized to put ISIS members on trial; alternately that a court be created with a treaty between Iraq and the U.N.
And though Iraq's President Barham Salih had announced he hoped parliament would shortly pass a bill promising financial compensation, education, housing and employment support to Yazidi survivors of sexual slavery, Nasreen Rasho feels unsafe in Iraq, compelling her to apply for resettlement in Australia. Thousands of suspected Islamic State members have gone on trial in Iraq and European nations such as Germany and France have initiated trials against ISIS terrorists who had returned to their European homes.
Freed Yazidi sex slaves burn their discarded burqas
"I could feel it. She was a piece of my soul. I loved her from that first moment [of birth]." "I held her so tight, and I kissed her until it was time to go. They [aid workers] gave me a receipt for her." "The difference is that I was honest [that she had been repeatedly raped by Islamic State terrorists, as a Yazidi sex slave, resulting in her pregnancy], and these mother were not [claiming their children were born of Yazidi men, not Muslims]." "They [Yazidi Supreme Spiritual Council] told me to get rid of my daughter, they said I had no honour. Now it's done." Hiyam, Yazidi, 21, escaped Islamic State sex slave
Hiyam, Photo: The Washington Post
"To make special examples in this case would be to whitewash the result of the Yazidi genocide." "We know that they're just children, and that they have no guilt. But in this case religion and society just cannot accept them." Karim Sulaiman, spokesperson, Yazidi Supreme Spiritual Council
She was one among the thousands of girls and young women who were captured as sex slaves when Islamic State terrorists invaded Sinjar, slaughtering and beheading Yazidi men and taking young girls and women as captives to be bartered and sold as sex slaves. Eventually thousands of the assumed twenty thousand who had been abducted and forced into slave labour as sex objects to be raped repeatedly, then discarded and sold elsewhere, escaped their captors and made their way back to the Yazidi community.
Some of those survivors faced suspicion, and a reluctance among the community to be accepted. For many the warmth of belonging to their community is withheld. If they are pregnant, if they gave birth to a child begotten from their slavery as sex objects, the community is constrained to welcome their return. The Yazidi faith is an ancient one, and it incorporates elements of pre-Islamic beliefs, scorned by Muslims as 'devil worshippers'.
When Hiyam discovered herself to be pregnant by an Islamic State terrorist who 'owned' her as his sex slave, the fourth in a procession of owners, she wept in despair and viewed the pregnancy and the impending birth with a certain dread. She attempted to miscarry and at night wept endlessly at her fate. A midwife handed her the baby, a tiny girl, and Hiyam's doubts completely vanished seeing her baby daughter's little face, mouth in a wide yawn.
The Yazidi highest religious body issued an edict in April that children born to an Islamic State father could be welcomed into the fold. That changed in the wake of the edict when a popular backlash harshly denounced the decision. Then hundreds of mothers faced the agony of a miserable option. they could choose to exclude themselves voluntarily from the community for the rest of their lives, or they could abandon the child and be welcomed back.
The Kurdish-speaking Yazidi community in Iraq, where Hiyam came from has long been accustomed to persecution. They have maintained their independence through strict obeisance to their spiritual leaders' guidance. With the mass enslavement of Yazidi women, Yazidi elders broke with centuries of precedent to decree women and girls would be free to return to the community, defying stigma associated with marrying or having sexual relations outside the faith.
Children born of forced unions became a matter of bitter contention since a child cannot be recognized as a Yazidi without both its parents being Yazidi. When Hiyam's child was born, she named the little girl Hiba, "a gift from God", in Arabic. Her family questioned smugglers and other girls who had escaped from their captors but no one knew of her whereabouts. Eventually Hiyam telephoned her mother, informed her of the baby's existence.
Her mother Shireen found her daughter Hiyam in 2017 close to the city of Mosul, bringing her back to the displacement camp where the community had been established in exile. Soon everyone knew of the child and pressure grew. Some in the community suspected her of sympathizing with ISIL. Causing her extended family members to inform her that she had to decide how to dispose of the child. She started remaining in the tent with the baby, until neighbours threatened to burn it.
So, one morning she awoke, bathed her child, dressed her in a new dress, picked up her little girl, walked out the tent door and past the neighbours, through the camp to a prefabricated building where she handed her sleeping baby over to aid workers, who then dismissed her after handing her a receipt for Hiba. Hiba awakened and in her mother's absence began screaming. She heard the baby's screams growing fainter as she walked away.
Hiyam has hung onto a small pair of white shoes, a woolly headband, and a bottle that had belonged to her baby. Mementos, all she has left of a beloved child. She valued the truth more than a sorrowful future of self-recrimination. Her troubled soul will struggle forever with the loss forced upon her. She will always think of her baby and the milestones of her development and growing maturity. Hiyam was deprived of her human dignity, violated, humiliated, given a gift, and forced to surrender that gift.
Hiyam's family lives in a tent refugee camp. Photo: The Washington Post
"We're asking to bring that child to be reunited with his mother. That's all we want. That's all the mother wants." "It's all the child wants." "A 12-year-old child is not safe unless he is in the arms of his mother. That's what we know; that's the language we understand." "But he is safe." "We don't want to be filling applications and documentation and such and such. We even offered to pay for the flight [to reunite the young boy with his mother in Winnipeg]." Hadji Hesso, Yazidi Association of Manitoba
"We didn't think we would ever see him again." "I was very saddened [by his condition] when I saw his photo ... I spoke to him on the phone and he said, 'I'm OK, I'm going to be fine'." "We will never forget what [ISIL] did to us -- the torture, the pain, everything they did to us." Nofa Zaghia, Yazidi refugee, Winnipeg, Manitoba
Emad Mishko Tamo was separated from his mother in August 2014 when the Yazidi family was captured by ISIS. (Facebook)
Now resident in Canada as a refugee, Nofa Zaghia is making a new life for herself and her four youngest children. She had two older boys with her husband. In 2014 Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant arrived to invade her village in Iraq. ISIL targeted the Yazidi minority for extermination looking upon them as unfit to live. They are a minority ethnic group whose religious practises sets them apart from the Muslim majority in Iraq, who consider them to be heretics.
Islamic State terrorists rounded up Yazidi men to slaughter and leave them in mass graves, while the women and children were taken as slaves, to be used and sold on the slave market. Women and girls to be used as sex slaves. Tens of thousands of Yazidis were besieged when they fled the terrorists on Mount Sinjar above the town of Sinjar and their surrounding villages. They, presumably, were the fortunate ones, escaping death and enslavement. But on the mountain they faced winter cold, privation and starvation.
Kurdish forces effected a rescue, and since then rescued Yazidis have sought asylum elsewhere than their homeland of Iraq. Untold numbers of Yazidi women and children are still being held by ISIL terrorists, others have been sold into slavery, ending up in places like Mali. And there are still families of Yazidis marooned on Mount Sinjar. This week Nofa Zaghia received a call from her brother, living in a refugee camp in Iraq. He informed her that her 12-year-old son Emad Mishko Tamo had been rescued by Iraqi soldiers and brought to the camp.
And her brother posted a photograph of the boy through social media, seated in a pickup truck, frail in appearance, wide-eyed, encrusted with blood and mud, but alive. Her two years living in captivity under Islamic State, separated from her husband and their two older boys left her convinced that only she and the four younger children had survived. Now she knows that she will be reunited with her 12-year-old son.
The fate of her other son and her husband is unknown to her. She had somehow managed to escape with her four young children, but she has no idea what happened to the others.
Emad is receiving medial treatment. He has a bullet wound in his arm, and sustained injuries to his stomach. The Yazidi association representing her interests and those of her son, receives assistance from the Kurdish Initiative for Refugees and Winnipeg Friends of Israel. Canadian authorities are being urged to expedite the young boy's journey from the refugee camp in Iraq to Canada, to be reunited with his mother and four younger siblings.
"When Daesh [the Arabic term for ISIL] came, we packed 21 of my family members into two cars to escape." "He [an Arab man in the next village] told us he would shelter us and took us into his house, where he hid us in the attic. We thought we would be safe, but instead he called Daesh. Our Sunni neighbour just handed us over to them when they arrived at the door." "They demanded that I tell them where I had hidden it [his cell phone]. They whipped me around 250 times over a few days until my skin began to fall off my back. But I wouldn't tell them." "I would rather have died from the lashing than have no way to communicate with her [his mother], to tell her I was still OK." "They told us again and again that the Yazidis were infidels. I was made to convert, but I didn't take it into my heart. One time I refused to say [the prophet] Mohammad's name and they shot at me between my legs." "My cousin and I hid in the roof [of a mosque] until they were finished. They didn't notice I wasn't there. I waited a few hours and then escaped when it was dark." "I still hear their voices in my head and think from time to time about what could have happened. But I am strong and I think they would never have broken me." Ahmed al-Hardani, Erbil, Iraq
A screengrab
from an Isil propaganda video that Ahmed al Hardani, 16, says shows a
training programme he was forced to participate in.Credit:
Sam Tarling for the Telegraph
He is now sixteen, and in 2014 when the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant marched on northern Iraq toward Sinjar, they attacked the town, sending thousands of Yazidis to flee in panic from their marauding militias bent on slaughter and conquest. Thousands of men were killed and left in mass graves, and thousands of young boys were taken as fodder to be trained by ISIL as fighters and suicide bombers in training camps.
Ahmed's family had attempted to escape, but found themselves betrayed by a Sunni Arab villager who brought their presence to the attention of ISIL. Women and girls in one truck, men and boys in another. And Ahmed never saw his father again, while his mother and sister were taken to Mosul and he and his brother and male cousins were driven to Tel Afar west of Mosul where they spent 15 days being interrogated by ISIL commanders.
The young Yazidi boys were taken to a training camp which specialized in teaching the "cubs of the caliphate". There, in Tel Afar, 200 Yazidi boys were housed in a school building, awoken every day at 6 a.m. when they had to recite passages by heart of the Qur'an. Islam, of course was not their religion. Theirs is a much older one, comprised of Zoroastrian elements, Judaic and Christian as well as Islamic elements, a religion viewed by Muslims as akin to worshipping the devil.
Two months of lessons led to the boys being taken for training to Mosul where they were taught to shoot and entertained with beheading videos to harden them. Given instructions, they were expected to practise cutting the throats of other pupils, in mock executions. They were taught how to produce an explosive vest and how best to carry out suicide missions. And to make them more willing to do as they were told they were given drugs. The youngest of those gathered were eight years of age.
After nine months had passed, it was graduation time. The boys were taken to a mosque for prayers one Friday. Which was when Ahmed and one of his cousins seized an opportunity to hide, until the entire group eventually departed the mosque, and they made their way down from their hiding place in the roof of the building. They set out to walk to the closest Yazidi village, 120 kilometers away, a trip that took them nine days.The boys had been told all the Yazidi men were dead and the women had converted to Islam.
"I believed them and thought there were no more Yazidis, so when I saw my mum and my relatives again and they told me it wasn't true I was so relieved. They were trying to wipe our people from the face of this Earth." Ahmed has difficulty breathing, a result of the beatings that contorted his chest. His family hasn't the means to pay for a medical examination. He lives with his mother, brother, sister and grandmother in a camp for refugees close by the city of Duhok.
Sinjar, Iraq, remains severely damaged and deserted 16 months after Daesh militants were pushed out.(Alice Martins / For The Washington Post)
Canadian Connection: Samaritan's Purse Aiding Iraqi Yazidis
"I do not wish to diminish the suffering of any other group at the hands of ISIL but the Yazidis were their number one target." "The barbarism and inhumanity of ISIL cannot be understood. It is something shameful." "The Yazidis can return home and become productive again. To help them secure their future would be a beautiful thing." "[The Calgary-based Good Samaritan operators responded to a compulsion to aid Yazidis] with hope through practical humanitarian intervention." "I can't lie. I am deeply disturbed by what I have witnessed." John Clayton, Calgarian, Samaritan's Purse humanitarian charity, Dohuk, Iraq
"Everyone has problems, not just the returnees from ISIL custody." "Those getting married often have lost relatives. Some of the girls have psychological problems. Being made up helps them. What we try to show them is that life goes on." Zhyan Haji Osman, beautyshop operator, Grace Community Centre, Dohuk, Iraq
"Women are definitely vulnerable as they walk through the camps with items that are sought after." "This [delivering food directly to tents for women-led households] gives them more dignity and protection." Kathryn Jagt, Calgarian, Samaritan's Purse, Iraq
Matthew Fisher/Postmedia News Ian
MacKay of Squamish, BC, distributes medicine and medical care only
metres away from where several suspected ISIL members were pulled from a
line by Iraqi security forces.
In a refugee camp teeming with Yazidi refugees from the unimaginable violence directed at them by Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, Samaritan's Purse representatives have been distributing food provided by the United Nations to Sunni Arabs who have fled the combat in Mosul, where Iraqi forces, Peshmerga and Shiite militias have entered the besieged city to clear explosives and confront the jihadist terrorists in street-by-street combat.
During the Christmas holidays a jumbo jet arrived, bursting with equipment for an urgently needed surgical hospital positioned not far from the Mosul front lines. Also expected to arrive shortly is a group of Canadian surgeons and surgical nurses to operate out of that hospital prepared for its opening in the new year. The Government of Canada has funded Samaritan's Purse humanitarian efforts.
John Clayton described what he has witnessed in Iraq through the victimization of the Yazidis, as the most horrible instances of persecution he has ever seen in his 26 years of work in sites such as Sudan and Haiti. He and his team have prepared themselves to undertake the aid required to launch the healing process of people who have suffered physical and psychological torture, though those Yazidis who were slaughtered are well beyond any human intervention.
Their surviving relatives, women who were enslaved, raped and emotionally tormented represent the focus of the humanitarian group, along with the children, torn from the moorings of their ancestral home and the comfort of extended family. The Grace Community Centre established by the humanitarian agency sits alongside a UN refugee camp and another, informal camp where close to 40,000 Yazidis are trying to cope with loss amid hopes for the future.
There, at the Centre, health care, social workers, food is available. There too, families are exposed to an animal husbandry program, each allotted 20 sheep, taught how they can build a flock to assume a new kind of existence for the future. There are carpentry, cooking, sewing and photography classes. And a beauty salon helping to guide women into feel-good-about-themselves frames of mind. For the children there are playgrounds complete with slides and swings.
Mathew Fisher/Postmedia News Yazidi
children play on a slide. Such recreational activities are one way that
Samaritan's Purse tries to get children to forget the extreme
persecution that the Yazidi community has suffered for more than two
years in northern Iraq.
On nearby fields instructors teach team play and the games of soccer and volleyball. There is a language school, teaching Yazidis the English language. Also at the Grace Centre is a modern clinic with doctors, including an obstetrician/gynecologist on staff, as well as a dentist and a pharmacist. These, needless to say, are the Yazidis that can be reached and aided.
There are Yazidis in desperate situations facing starvation and privation during the winter months, still remaining on Mount Sinjar. They are ill-equipped to face the cold and the snow, lacking adequate garments, the children suffering, living in a zone resembling hell on Earth, with no escape, a forgotten and neglected people that fate has abandoned to the predation and victimization of a remorselessly monstrous enemy.
Iraqi Kurdish Yazidis on Mount Sinjar. Photo: Actukurde
"I have heard nothing of my husband and daughters since the day that Daesh [Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant] took us." "I cannot sleep at night; I think and I think and I think." "They are in God's hands. We depend on God to take care of us. We believe in Him. I have no power, so I ask God to release them." Ayshan Murat, Sinuni, Iraq
Matthew Fisher / National Post Ayshan Murat stands with her two sons, Jamal and Hachem (in her arms) who were released last year in Syria
"[ISIL did] terrible things." "You can understand the meaning of 'destroyed' if you come here. Yazidi women were taken. Yazidi men were killed." Aziz Chanem, Sinuni, Iraq
"I don't think anybody could really understand the depth of human suffering that has happened here. The kind of trauma and kind of cruelty that these people have endured is something beyond what many of us have ever heard of or thought of." "How they keep going through the injury and assault and abuse that they have suffered is amazing to me." "They cannot finalize within themselves whether they are dead or alive or in captivity. They live in perpetual grief that can be very taxing." "I am inspired by many of the women that have returned from intense suffering and intense abuse. They decide for the sake of their children they are going to get better and they work at making themselves better. They work at providing as comfortable a home as they can in their tent or unfinished building. Many of these women are inspiring to know because of the courage they show. They try to leave behind what has happened to them." "We can help them with material things. But what they want is faith and hope." Marigold Vercoe, Australian psychiatric nurse, humanitarian worker, Sinuni, Iraq
Yazidis' religion is an unique and ancient one, with various influences and origins. Their religion is particularly scorned by the barbarians of Islamic State. ISIL in its Sunni-sect-inspired Islamism has tormented and threatened and slaughtered Shiite Muslims, and Iraqi Christians, but it has reserved its very special atrociously inhumane treatment for Iraqi Yazidis. The men corralled and subjected to mass slaughter, women and children taken as slaves to be sold, and young women and girls as bartered sex slaves.
When Islamic State first marched into the ancestral geography of Iraq's Yazidi population around the city of Sinjar and the many towns in the area, they cleansed the city and the towns through killing and kidnapping. Those Yazidi men, women and children who managed to escape the deadly noose that closed around them, fled up nearby Sinjar mountain two years ago, and with winter oncoming, they were without food and potable water and shelter.
Ahmad Al-Rubaye / AFP / Getty Images A
file picture taken on August 13, 2014, shows displaced Iraqi families
from the Yazidi community crossing the Iraqi-Syrian border at the
Fishkhabur crossing, in northern Iraq
Both Iraqi and Syrian Kurds mounted a rescue of the trapped Yazidis, helping them off the mountain and into Kurdish territory. The Iraqi and Syrian Kurds had a falling out with the Syrian Kurds wanting to continue aid, comfort and haven for the Yazidis, guiding those they rescued toward Syria, while the Peshmerga warned the Syrian Kurds to vacate Iraqi Kurdish territory. The international community save for a brief flyover by American planes dropping supplies, did nothing. There are still thousands of Yazidis trapped on the mountain awaiting rescue, facing another winter.
The United Nations has given technical refugee status to Syrians fleeing their government, but have ignored the plight of the Yazidis. Without the official status of documented refugees it is difficult for countries offering to take in Syrian and Iraqi refugees to focus on taking in Yazidis as the most vulnerable and in need of help. To be eligible for UN refugee status people cannot remain in their native countries, but must move elsewhere.
Iraqi and Kurdish governments, along with international organizations, have discovered mass graves teeming with the skeletons of murdered Yazidis; some were shot, others buried while still alive, where leg bones and jaws can be seen in a field around Sinjar city which has since been retrieved by the government of Iraq. And where electricity and potable water are in short supply. Yazidis are slowly returning to the city where it will take a monumental effort to return it to the status and condition its residence once enjoyed.
Sinjar was once the cultural hub of the Yazidi community, where almost 100,000 resided. Now it is abandoned, its streets and buildings bearing the hallmarks of the violent ISIL invasion. There are booby-trapped bombs silently waiting to be set off, there are tunnels everywhere, ISIL-built and -used as cover for airstrikes and escape routes.
ISIL is complacent in its treatment of non-believers, with codified strict rules "on taking captives and slaves", published as guides. Women could be beaten, according to Koranic instructions and girls as well, avoiding the head. Women between 34 and 40 years of age are to be sold for $75, and those between age ten and 20 years valued at $130, while girls under the age of nine had a price tag of $172.
Ayshan Murat spoke of her nightmare when her family was captured two years earlier by the jihadists. She and her two young sons spent 14 months in captivity until her father-in-law and other relatives paid ISIL a ransom of $20,000 for their release. No one knows what had become of her husband and their three daughters after they were captured in their farming village at the foot of Sinjar mountain. Separated, she and her boys were taken to Syria and her husband and their girls, nine, seven and five were sent to Mosul.
"We want to take them out of here. There are only bones left. But they said, 'No, they have to stay there, a committee will come and exhume them later." Rasho Qassim, Sinjar, Iraq
"I have lots of people I know there. Mostly friends and neighbours." "It's very difficult to look at them [within the mass burial mound] every day." Arkan Qassem, Gurmiz village
"They are beheading them, shooting them, running them over in cars, all kinds of killing techniques, and they don't even try to hide it." Sirwan Jalal, director, Iraqi Kurdistan agency of mass graves
"I was No. 43. I heard them say '615', and then one ISIL guy said, 'We're going to eat well tonight'. A man behind us asked, 'Are you ready?' Another person answered 'Yes', and began shooting at us with a machine gun." A.S., survivor of Hardan massacre; Human Rights Watch account
Wherever Islamic State militias stormed towns and villages in Iraq they left companions for the Angel of Death, in abundance. In Sinjar district, traditionally home to Yazidi tribal peoples, an ancient people worshipping an ancient religion despised by Muslims, Islamic State massacred thousands of Yazidis. Those who could, fled. They fled from Sinjar city up Sinjar mountain to escape the deadly predation of the Islamic State.
ISIL slaughtered the Yazidi men and the boys, retaining Yazidi women and girls to be taken as slaves for barter and for sex slaves in accordance with Koranic injunctions sanctifying the use of women from conquered tribes as concubines. Now that Islamic State is being routed from many of the towns and villages they took possession of as part of their declared caliphate, mass graves are being discovered, in them thousands of skeletons of their victims.
One young man recounted having watched through binoculars as Islamic State terrorists lined up men with their hands tied, leaving them unable to do anything to save themselves, as they were gunned down and piled into the waiting mass gravesites; buried with the help of a bulldozer. It took, he said, six days for the jihadists to fill one grave after another. He watched his friends and neighbours die. There are five mass graves at the foot of Sinjar mountain, resulting from the attack in 2014.
Those five represent a small proportion of the mass graves scattered in the geography of Iraq and Syria. A survey undertaken by the Associated Press has identified 72 mass graves, but it is expected that many more will be revealed, linked with the ongoing retreat of Islamic State from their shrinking caliphate. Locations have been identified in Syria of 17 mass graves, one of which holds hundreds of skeletons representing a single tribe, exterminated when their region was inundated by ISIL.
Satellite images offer a view of the city of Mosul's Badough Prison which in June of 2014 fell to ISIL which then slaughtered 600 inmates. This is the large city whose central bank released almost a billion dollars to ISIL when it embarked on its looting spree. Arkan Qassem had seen Gurmiz, his village, raided, with everyone fleeing up the mountain. He and nine other men returned to their village armed with light weapons.
A bulldozer's headlights shone brightly, illuminating handcuffed men being killed and the bulldozer then plowing the bodies. It took six days of three more groups to fill the graves. At Ramadi, close to a stadium, graves are covered over with a thin earth coating. When the prison inmates were slaughtered they were first separated by religious sect; Shiites were counted off by the Sunni jihadis. Some managed to survive by playing dead.
4 Mosul
Satellite images show
likely burial site for victims of June 2014 Badoush Prison massacre. Up
to 600 bodies could be packed into a roadside trench
5 Tikrit
Isis overran Camp Speicher airbase in June 2014, killing more than 1,500 army cadets and dumping the bodies in mass graves
6 Fallujah
In June 2016 the Iraqi
army found a grave containing the bodies of 400 Iraqi soldiers killed
during the two-year Isis occupation of the city
1 El-Horta
Hundreds of victims were found buried north-west of Raqqa, the de facto Isis capital
2 Abu Haman
Isis killed up to 1,000
members of the Shaitat tribe when they took territory near Deir ez-Zor
in August 2014. Local residents found a grave containing 400 victims
3 Sinjar
Six sites containing more than 100 bodies found on Mount Sinjar where Yazidis tried to escape Isis advance in August 2014
"He [ISIL slave-owning soldier] told us that Taus Malik is not God. He said that Taus Malik is the devil and that because you worship the devil, you belong to us." "We [Islamic State terrorists] can sell you and use you [as a slave], as we see fit." Escaped Yazidi woman
Kirsten Luce for TIMENadia, a young Iraqi Yezidi who was abducted into slavery by members of ISIS, is photographed in the U.S.
Two years ago the world became aware of an obscure tribe of people living in the Middle East, called the Yazidi. They live in Turkey, in Syria, in Iraq and elsewhere, in small villages, and often among a larger Kurdish population. They have been historically vulnerable as a distinct ethnic group with a religion that is considered to be a hybrid religion, not Muslim, but taking elements from even earlier religions of the region.
Their history as a people is an ancient one, known to have arisen in Mesopotamia. They have, despite aeons of oppression, discrimination and massacres, remained true to one another and to their religion which Muslims declare to be devil-worshipping. They are the quintessential outsiders, they find protection only living among the Kurds, another, much larger distinct ethnic group which considers the Yazidis to be a Kurdish 'cousin', an offshoot.
As far as Muslims are concerned, the Yazidis are subhuman, leading to contempt for them and their beliefs, leading in turn to ongoing repression and violations of their most basic human rights. They, on the other hand, respect both the Bible and the Qur'an. Their own religion follows an oral tradition of belief in souls and rebirth and ultimate purification as monotheists whose singular divine being is represented by seven spirits.
The greatest of those spirits is named the Peacock Angel, Malik Taus, the executor of divine will to whom Yazidis pray. An alternate name for Malik Taus is Shaytan, Arabic for "devil", leading Muslims to cast aspersions on Yazidis and their religion as devil worshippers. It is in their self-appointed role as defenders of Islam that Islamic State has taken to "erase their identity", as the UN describes the genocidal intentions of ISIL.
The Islamic State assault two years ago on the major Yazidi town of Sinjar saw five thousand Yazidi men and boys slaughtered, and over three thousand Yazidi women and girls rounded up to be taken away as slaves. The women are used in a system of human ownership lauded by ISIL, which refers to the Koran for its guidance in how to treat their vulnerably helpless captives.
They are bought and sold, kept in compounds like cattle until such time as a buyer steps forward. They have no rights, since they are entirely the possession of whomever buys them. They can be bought singly or in groups by 'wholesalers'. They are despised as unbelievers, relegated to an even lower status than Christians and Jews.
One woman attributes her freedom to the collusion of the wife of the man who bought her, enabling her successful escape. They represent, it seems the "Jews" of the Arab/Muslim world of conquest, rejection and subjugation.
"There is no strategy planned by the [Kurdistan regional government]
to destroy or destruct any component villages, any component set up in
these newly liberated areas. [Peshmerga forces] have been in full obligation to
implement the standards of and principles of international human rights,
international humanitarian laws." "[But] there are a few cases where an entire village stood against the Peshmerga ... they fought in line [alongside Isis militants]." Dindar Zebari, Peshmerga spokesman, Iraq
"It
does appear to be a form of collective punishment of perceived
sympathizers [with Islamic State]. Rather than deal with individuals,
they [Kurds] are punishing whole [Sunni Arab] communities." "If
you're interacting with those forces Canadian special forces working
closely with Kurdish troops] I think you're obliged to know what they're
doing." "You have an obligation to ensure that violations of human rights and humanitarian law aren't occurring." Hilary Homes, spokesperson, Amnesty International, Ottawa
"By barring the displaced from returning to their villages and
destroying their homes KRG forces are further exacerbating their
suffering," AFP
This is the Middle East. This is the
geography of militant tribalism, of venomous sectarianism, of violent
attacks against minority groups, led for the most part by Islamist
distrust and hatred for non Muslims and 'apostates' alike. Where verses
in the Koran enjoin the faithful to conflict with the despised infidels
and Jews: "Do not take the Jews and the Christians
for your friends and allies” (5:51) and “You shall find none who
believe in Allah and the Last Day on friendly terms with those who
oppose Allah and His Messenger [i.e., non-Muslims] — even if they be
their fathers, their sons, their brothers, or their nearest kindred"
(Koran 58:22; see also 3:28, 60:4, 2:120).
The
incessant violence being perpetrated by one Muslim sect against another
reflects the culture of viral tribalism and poisonous sectarian
animosities. And when geography throws in the complications of ethnic
groups, the Kurds and the Yazidis, the Druze and other minorities whom
the majority groups view as inferior and think nothing of depriving of
their lives, the dangerous cocktail of Arab and Muslim dysfunction
erupts under the volcanic pressures of endemic and constantly erupting
issues of survival.
The
West and its human rights groups look on from afar at what unfolds in
the Middle East as one 'nation' after another implodes, and often with
considerable assistance from the meddling West. Remove a totalitarian
government and the vacuum that results invites even more intolerance and
violence to explosively erupt as tribal and sectarian and ethnic and
clan hatreds are inflamed, setting the landscape onto a trajectory of
inflicting utter disorder and bloodshed in generous proportions.
Destroyed homes in the village of Barzanke in Iraq's northeastern Diyala provincePhoto: AFP
A
new Amnesty International report highlights the region's Kurds taking
the initiative to seek revenge for the humiliations and violence and
depredations they suffered in Iraq under the regime of Saddam Hussein.
This is the militant Kurds who have given haven and protection to the
minority groups whom the Shiite Iraqis have persecuted more latterly and
whom the Sunni terrorist groups like ISIL have tormented, enslaved and
slaughtered.
According
to Amnesty its report accuses the Kurdistan Regional Government and its
allied militias in northern Iraq of bulldozing, exploding, or torching
thousands of homes in a deliberate campaign to banish Arab communities
from the area the Kurds claim sovereignty in. The displacement of Arab
populations by force and destruction reflects Amnesty's research of 13
villages and towns including testimony from eyewitnesses and victims.
"It
would be very hard to see how this was militarily justified [widespread
destruction of villages]. This is deliberate destruction, the punishing
of entire communities", commented Hilary Homes,
spokesperson for Amnesty International on security issues in Ottawa of
the report corroborated by satellite imagery. The claim is that Kurdish
Peshmerga forces and sometimes Yazidi militias and Kurdish armed groups
from Syria and Turkey operated alongside the Peshmerga to force
thousands of Arabs to abandon their homes.
Internally displaced Arab Iraqis at a camp in Khanaqin in Iraq's northeastern Diyala province Photo: AFP
And
the Kurdish Regional Government forces have barred those Arab civilians
from attempting to return to the areas recaptured from the Islamic
State of Iraq and the Levant, where the Sunni Arab civilians lived under
the banner of the Sunni ISIL jihadists. The Kurds are busy
consolidating their territorial gains in "disputed areas" claimed
traditionally by the Kurdish Regional Government as their own, in a
drive to address abuses from the past by the Saddam Hussein tyranny.
Kurds
had formerly been forcibly displaced by Saddam Hussein's military for
the purpose of settling Arabs in those very same areas. It was the Kurds
who launched the rescue of Yazidis trapped by Islamic State when the
jihadi terrorists captured Sinjar, slaughtered Yazidis, took their women
captive as sex slaves, and people fled in terror from the invasion onto
Mount Sinjar, trapped without provisions on the winter mountain. Little
wonder that Yazidis seek their revenge.
It
is dreadful that the revenge falls not on the jihadists who attacked,
raped and enslaved Yazidis, but on their co-sectarian civilian Sunni
Arabs who may have viewed their actions with favour, or indifference. On
the other hand, war is a dreadful human construct of misery and dread.
And in the Middle East empathy and compassion always appear to be on
short order unless it is directed at people of the same clan or tribe or
religious sect.
The
horrible excess of slaughter that has taken place under the command of a
tyrannical president in Syria punishing his civilian subjects who
protested their unequal treatment as opposed to that of the opposite
sect, just about equals the wretchedly grotesque butchery of the
non-state Islamist militias associated with al-Qaeda, and most
particularly Islamic State. It is the danger posed by the Islamists who
look beyond the region to inflict their brand of Islamic justice on the
West that democracies are engaged in bringing to a halt.
Thus
far, it is has not been the military of Iraq or of Syria that have
successfully contested the advance of the Islamists, but the courage and
perseverance of the Kurds in defending their people and their
territory. And it has been the Kurds whom the Americans and the
Canadians have favoured in tutoring in the art of successful warfare
against an implacable enemy of humankind. There should be the
recognition of a universal standard of human rights obligations, that
much is true.
The
old adage, when in Rome do as the Romans do might not fit exactly here,
but it does go a long way to explaining why and how it happens that a
large ethnic group long suffering persecution and existential hardship
is finally determined to claim its territory and to defend its
population and in so doing is deserving of the assistance of those
attuned to the situation and immersed in doing what they can to change
it.
Honor
roll for defense of ISIS victims: Canadian Jewish businessman Steve
Maman (left), Syriac Orthodox nun Hatune Dogan, and Swedish activist
Hans Erling Jensen.
"I've been raped 30 times and it's not even lunchtime," cried one
young Yazidi woman in a dangerous and desperate call. Chillingly, she
begged the man on the line, someone embedded with the Kurdish Peshmerga
fighting ISIS: "If you know where we are, please bomb us. There is no
life after this. I am going to kill myself anyway."
That request was made a year ago. So far, no brothel has been bombed, no slave auction interrupted.
President Obama's much favored "international community" — the United
Nations, the European Union, the politically correct Western
intelligentsia, the NGOs, the human-rights organizations — hasn't
rescued this woman or any of the other mainly Christian and Yazidi sex
slaves who remain in the clutches of the barbarians.
But some individual heroes are doing so. With Oscar Schindler, Sir
Nicholas Winton and Chiune Sugihara — who saved thousands of Jews during
the Holocaust — as role models, Canadian Jewish businessman Steve Maman
has, so far, overseen the rescue of more than 120 kidnapped Christian
and Yazidi girls in Iraq. Maman founded the Liberation of Christian and
Yazidi Children of Iraq organization a year ago, after jihadists laid
siege to Mosul and Sinjar.
Sister Hatune Dogan and Hans Erling Jensen of the Hatune Foundation
have been rescuing Christian and Yazidi girls and women from Iraq and
bringing them to Europe, mainly to Germany, for medical and
psychological treatment.
Yazidi fighters head to battle ISIS on the summit of Mount Sinjar, Iraq, in December 2014.
Last month, Sister Hatune went to the Sinjar Shingal mountains.
Thirteen Yazidi fighters "covered" her as she went to "the front lines."
She reports that "right now, there are 30,000 Yazidi fighters trying to
stop the expansion of ISIS in this area. They live in 2,000 tents, in
open camps in the mountains. They get neither support from the West or
from the Kurds."
She personally interviewed a young Yazidi girl who had been held
captive by ISIS for two months. She was 14. "She was raped five to 10
times every day. She couldn't express what she had been through. 'I was
dead — killed — hundreds of times,' she says. She knew of many girls
that had jumped from a high rock to kill themselves because they could
not live on with the shame."
This young girl is now safe.
The Hatune Foundation has freed 317 Christian and Yazidi girls from ISIS captivity since January 2014.
Last month, I met with Jensen in Europe to talk about the work he and
Sister Hatune are doing. She described her monthly visits to the
rescued girls this way: "I give them my shoulder to cry on. There is
little more relief we can offer until we get them to Europe."
Since January 2014, the Hatune Foundation has freed "317 Christian
and Yazidi girls from the hands of ISIS." In addition, with the help of
"partners," the foundation has been involved in "280 additional
releases."
Right now, "200 women and girls are under professional care in
Germany" where they can safely recover. Most of these girls are without
family.
Many have seen their loved ones brutally murdered. The task is huge.
Jensen met Sister Hatune and became director of the Hatune Foundation
last year. They agreed to mount a web platform as a way of campaigning
for the rescue of Christians and Yazidis. Sister Hatune got special
permission from the Archbishop of the Syrian Orthodox Church to work
outside the church.
Jensen tells me: "They have all been raped, sold as slaves countless
times . . . Our long-term goal is to offer them security and comfort in
life. We have bought three houses close to the foundation's headquarters
[in Germany] and we intend to design them for these girls when they
have finished treatment."
The Foundation is located in Germany because there is a large, active
Yazidi community there — and, Jensen says, because Germany is "into
Christianity much more so than many other European countries."
The Yazidi women are not waiting for Western feminists or Western military men to come their aid.
A Yazidi singer, Xate Shingali, with the permission of Kurdish
President Masoud Barzani, just formed an all-female brigade to fight
ISIS. They have been equipped with AK-47s and wear military fatigues.
Shingali says: "While we have had only basic training, we are ready to
fight ISIS anytime."
She adds, "ISIS will never go to heaven. We will kill them."
Phyllis Chesler, a
Shillman-Ginsburg fellow at the Middle East Forum, is an emerita
professor of psychology and women's studies and the author of sixteen
books.
"One should remember that enslaving the families of the [nonbelievers]
and taking their women as concubines is a firmly established aspect of
Islamic law." "Their creed is so deviant from the
truth that even cross-worshipping Christians for ages considered them
devil worshippers and Satanists." "The enslaved Yazidi families are now sold by the Islamic State soldiers." Islamic State magazine, Dabiq
Islamic State jihadists say they sell enslaved Yazidi women for as little as $US1000 ($1142) to use as concubines. Photo: AP
The Islamic State propaganda magazine has given the world notice that Yazidi women and children represent spoils of war. Captured as the fanatical jihadists marched into their ancient towns and villages in Iraq, thousands of women and children are suffering unspeakable atrocities, and considered in their vulnerable state to be valuable as livestock used for breeding purposes. Hundreds of thousands of Yazidis, an offshoot of Kurds, practising pre-monotheistic religious rites were made homeless by the Islamic State advance.
Targets for Islamic State ... Yazidi Iraqi women walk
at the Bajid Kandala camp near the Tigris River, in Kurdistan's western
Dohuk province, where they took refuge after fleeing advances by IS
jihadists in Iraq. Photo: AFP
Young women and teenage girls were separated from their families, while thousands of Yazidi men were slaughtered, many beheaded, and many more desperately fled to the mountain behind their Sinjar area of northern Iraq, last August. It was the Kurds of Syria and Iraq who came to their rescue, helping the tens of thousands of Yazidis who had fled their towns and villages with the advance of the Islamic State in fear for their lives, finding themselves stranded on the mountain, starving.
Those who had fled the Sinjar area had described men being massacred, and hundreds of women and children taken by the marauders. Dabiq described how the women and children were divided among fighters, in accordance with Islamic law. In an article contained in the magazine, it was stated that Christians and Jews, in reflection of the Koranic canon, can be offered the opportunity to save their lives by paying a tax or through conversion. Yazidis, though, are not accorded those privileges.
The men are murdered, because their religious devotion is anathema to Islamists, while the women and children are enslaved, captured during a conflict, reflecting the very historical advance of Islam during its formative years when it embarked on a far-reaching odyssey to spread the faith by the scimitar, claiming the Middle East as its own, and advancing into Europe to proselytize in their inimitably violent manner, increasing the numbers of the faithful and their geographic domination.
Human Rights Watch based in New York interviewed some Yazidi women who carefully avoided admitting they had been raped, and for reason enough, since the shame of having been a victim of sexual assault is a stigmatizing factor in the deeply conservative sect. One woman who was interviewed by them stated she had experienced seeing "brides" taken from a school and a prison that she had been held in. "Some were as young as 12 or 13, and up to age 20", she affirmed. "The Islamic State's litany of horrific crimes against the Yazidis in Iraq only keeps growing", Fred Abrahams, a special adviser at Human Rights Watch said. Islamic State jihadis are faithful to the traditions of historical Islam. They are intent on putting into practise precisely what the history of Islam's development and inexorable spread reveals. And in the process treating those whom they conquer in the very same manner their forbears did.
Islamic State consider themselves authentic Islam reborn. And with that authenticity comes the obligation to Islam to obey the major precepts of the responsibility of all Muslims to convert those without the faith to a presence within the faith. Conversion is a triumph. One which does not necessarily confer responsibility of the inductor toward the inductee. Which is why Islamic State sees no reason why it should not behead foreign abductees whether or not they convert to Islam.
This represents a general opinion site for its author. It also offers a space for the author to record her experiences and perceptions,both personal and public. This is rendered obvious by the content contained in the blog, but the space is here inviting me to write. And so I do.
