PHOTO: Yazidi women in a refugee camp, August 2014
In August 2014, the Islamic State overran areas of northwest Iraq populated by Yazidis, a faith with elements of ancient Islam, Christianity, and Zoroastrianiam. Thousands of men were reportedly slain and many hundreds of women captured as 200,000 fled.
Witnesses and videos, including from Islamic State fighters, documented how women were sold and traded between fighters.
Writing for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Joanna Paraszczuk tells the story of one of those women:
We stayed on our feet while they looked for the ones who were pretty, those with a nice body, or pretty eyes, or pretty hair, or a pretty face. They would take them, rape them, and pass them on to others.”
This is one of the terrifying memories that 28-year-old Ghazala, a Yazidi woman from Sinjar in Iraq’s Kurdistan region, has of her ordeal in Islamic State captivity.
Ghazala and her younger sister Narin were held prisoner in the extremist group’s de facto capital, the Syrian city of Raqqa, for nine months.
Sold as slaves, the sisters were forced to work in servitude there for an IS gunman.
After their dramatic rescue by a Yazidi activist and businessman who helped Ghazala and Narin reach relative safety in a refugee camp in the Kurdistan city of Duhok, Ghazala spoke to RFE/RL’s Radio Free Iraq about her experiences.
The Abductions
August 3, 2014 is a date that the Yazidi people will never forget.
That was the day IS gunmen attacked and overran the predominantly Yazidi town of Sinjar, slaughtering thousands of men, capturing thousands of women and children, and forcing almost 200,000 more Yazidis to flee for their lives.
Ghazala and her four younger siblings, two sisters and two brothers, joined the panicked exodus to Mount Sinjar. Orphans whose parents died years ago, the five siblings decided to join their other relatives in their uncle’s house, next to the mountain.
But IS caught up with them.
“There were 100 of us…our relatives,” Ghazala recalls. “They attacked and took all of us — men, children, girls, all of us, even the older women.”
The Prison
In those first days after the abduction, IS militants took Ghazala and her relatives to various places in the vicinity of Sinjar. Ghazala remembers spending one night in Tal Afar, some 52 kilometers east of Sinjar.
After that, she and her relatives were driven to the notorious Badush prison in the IS-held Iraqi city of Mosul.
“There were many women and children there in that prison. They held all of us there for five days,” Ghazala says.
It was in Badush that the gunmen began to systematically separate and sort their Yazidi captives.
“First they took away the boys who were seven years old. Then they took the older women,” Ghazala says, adding that it was unknown where they were taken. “Then they brought big buses to take the girls. They took us back to a school in Tel Afar.”
The Rapes
The IS gunmen in Badush took Ghazala, her sister, and the rest of the younger Yazidi women to Raqqa in Syria.
It was there, in IS’s de facto capital, that their captors began selling the Yazidi women and girls as sex slaves to other militants, including foreign fighters.
Ghazala recalls how her fellow captives were sold as chattel to IS militants who showed up in groups to haggle over the human goods.
“Every hour some IS men came — two, three, four, five, six, seven of them,” Ghazala says. “They opened the door carrying big sticks. They told us to stand up. They beat any of us who didn’t stand up.”
When a militant chose a girl he was interested in, he would drag her to the bathroom to “examine” her before handing over cash to pay for her.
“They would strip her and if they liked her they bought her,” she remembers.
As with all goods offered for sale, some of the Yazidi girls and women were considered more valuable than others.
The gunmen were particularly interested in the youngest and prettiest girls, whom they raped and then passed them on to other gunmen, Ghazala says.
Islamic State fighters laugh over enslavement of women, autumn 2014
The Gift
Then it was Ghazala’s turn.
“First they took the young good-looking girls. Then one of the guards, a Saudi man, took down my and my sister’s names and that of my cousin — she’s 13,” Ghazala says.
The two sisters and their teenage cousin were sent — “not sold, but given as a gift,” Ghazala notes — to the Wali, or IS leader, of the Syrian city of Homs.
The Wali, it seems, travelled to Raqqa to collect “his” women — but not before the gunmen of Raqqa added a fourth Yazidi girl to the group as largesse.
The four girls were informed by the Wali and his retinue that their job was to “serve him”.
“We told them that we would serve and do anything asked of us,” Ghazala recalls. “But don’t marry us. We don’t want marriage.”
Ghazala describes how the Wali came that night and took her and her sister to a small, dark building.
But they stayed only one night there. At six o’clock the next morning, the Wali and his guards took Ghazala and Narin to Homs.
“I don’t know where the girls who were with us are now,” Ghazala says. “They took us to the home of Arab Bedouins who had fled.”
The Old Moroccan
When they got to Homs, Ghazala and Narin expected to be forced to become the Wali’s personal slaves.
But they soon found themselves confronted by a different abuser.
“A 60-year-old IS Moroccan man came and asked us about our parents’ whereabouts,” Ghazala says. “I told him they have been dead for a long time, and that I had raised my siblings.”
Ghazala begged the Moroccan to let her go. She told him that she and her sister had not done anything wrong.
At first, the Moroccan played along.
“He said that we were safe with them and that I was like a daughter to him and that he would be as a father to me,” Ghazala remembers.
But 15 minutes later, the Moroccan gunman told Ghazala that she had to “go to him”. Frightened, she refused.
The Moroccan did not give up.
He asked another gunman to help him grab hold of Ghazala’s sister, Narin.
But Ghazala didn’t give up, either. The Yazidi woman fought back to save her sister.
“They took my sister but I came at them from behind and put [their] gun to my sister’s head. The Moroccan said he wanted to marry me,” Ghazala says. “Then I hit him, and he hit me, and I pulled his long beard. He then tied up my hands and I fell to the floor. I prayed to God for help.”
After she promised not to make any noise, the Moroccan gunman finally untied Ghazala.
But five days later, he came back.
He repeated his offer of marriage to Ghazala, but the Yazidi woman turned down his proposals.
“I said that I wouldn’t marry him and that if he came near me I would kill myself,” Ghazala told Radio Free Iraq. “I told him that he would be delivering us from our suffering if they were to kill us.”
The Sale
The Moroccan told Ghazala that he would spare her life.
But he vowed that she would never escape from IS captivity.
“He said that he would not kill us but would keep me and my sister imprisoned until we died,” Ghazala says. “He asked if we knew where we were and I told him that we were in Syria. He said that Syria would be our grave.”
The Moroccan was wrong about that. But neither he nor Ghazala knew that, yet.
With Ghazala determined not to marry him, the Moroccan ordered his men to sell her and her sister on to other militants.
The money raised from the sale of the two women would be sent to his family in Morocco, the militant said.
Thinking fast, Ghazala came up with a plan to try to reach the outside world.
“The pretty [girls] were expensive. I, for example, would fetch a lower price. So I said that if they allowed me to contact my family, they would send more money than our selling price,” Ghazala said.
But the Moroccan didn’t agree. Instead, he asked an IS Shari’a judge in Raqqa who ruled that Ghazala and her sister Narin must be sold.
“Then a man came and bought me and my sister and took us to Raqqa,” says Ghazala.
The Suicides
For four long months, Ghazala and Narin were forced to work as slaves for an IS militant whose nom de guerre, Abu Mohammad al-Shami, suggests that he was a Syrian.
During that time, Ghazala saw other captives attempt suicide — the only way they could escape IS brutality.
Ghazala contemplated taking her own life on three occasions, she says.
“I could not tolerate the suffering at IS’s hands,” Ghazala says. “But I didn’t kill myself, for [my sister’s] sake. If she had not been with me I would have committed suicide.
The Escape
Ghazala and her sister were rescued from IS captivity by Abu Shujaa, a Yazidi activist and businessman who helps Yazidi women escape IS captivity.
But most Yazidi girls have no chance of escape, Ghazala says.
“None of the girls ever said that they wouldn’t try to escape if there were a way to do so, but there isn’t. There is no contact, and many of the Yazidi girls don’t know a word of Arabic,” she says. “There is nothing there but the desert. It is much better in Raqqa, where the Internet is available. No phones, but the Internet is available.”
