“Slave for sale: 12 years old, not a virgin, very beautiful”: the hell of girls and women sold by Islamic State

In 2014, thousands of Yazidi women and children were enslaved by the Islamic State (IS) radical group in Iraq and Syria. His fellow Yazidis began a rescue operation almost immediately, but today, nearly a decade later, the task has not been completed.

November 2015, Bahar and his three young children were sold for the fifth time.

She was one of many Yazidi women captured by IS 18 months earlier when the group raided her village in northern Iraq’s Sinjar district.

The Yazidis are a religious and ethnic minority who have lived in Iraq for more than 6,000 years, but were labeled “infidels” by the self-proclaimed Islamic State..

The group had already taken her husband and eldest son with them. She believes they were shot and buried in a mass grave.

Bahar remembers how she and other children all lined up in a room crying because they thought they were going to be beheaded. The reality is that they were sold.

Then the real horror began.

Slavery

Bahar says he had to serve IS fighters, become your property.

“I had to pretend to be his wife whenever they wanted. They can hit me if they want.” Their children were all under 10 years old and they were all beaten as well. One of his daughters was hit in the face with a rifle butt.

The fourth “owner” was a Tunisian named Abu Khattab. “We stayed in his house, but he loaned me out to others so that I could work as a cleaner in two other IS bases. In all those places I went to work, I cleaned and they raped me..

“And there were air strikes all the time. IS fighters ran everywhere, grabbing weapons or hiding from the shelling. It was chaos, it was worse than a nightmare.”

One day, while Bahar and her children were at Abu Khattab’s house, a car with tinted windows pulled up on the property. The driver was dressed in black and had a long beard, he looked no different from all other IS fighters.

Bahar realized that she was being sold again, along with her children..

Overwhelmed by the situation, Bahar yelled at the man to kill her, she just couldn’t take it anymore.

But what happened next changed everything.

A cinematic rescue

As they drove off, the driver told them, “I’ll take you somewhere else.” Bahar didn’t know what was going on or if she should trust the man, and she started to worry.

The man gave Bahar the phone: it was the voice of Abu Shuja, a man known for coordinating the rescue of many women and children. He realized that the driver bought her and her children so they could be rescued.

Bahar was taken to a construction site somewhere near Raqqa in Syria. They left her and told her that a man was coming, the code word would be “Sayeed” and she should go with him.

And so it happened, someone arrived on a motorcycle and spoke the word. He told Bahar to get on the motorbike with his sons and added: “Listen, we are in IS territory, there are checkpoints. If they ask you something, don’t say a word so they don’t recognize your Yazidi accent.”

Bahar says the man took them to his house: “They were so nice to us there, we could bathe, they gave us food and painkillers and they told us: ‘you are safe now'”.

Another man took pictures of Bahar and his children and sent them to Abu Shuja to make sure they were the right people. After, around 3 am they woke up the family and said it was time to move again.

The man who owned the house where they were staying gave Bahar his mother’s ID card and told her that if anyone asked her anything, she should say she was taking her son to the doctor. “We went through several IS checkpoints, but they didn’t stop us at any.”

Finally they reached a town on the border between Syria and Iraq and Bahar was received by Abu Shuja and his brother. “I was about to collapse,” he says, “I don’t remember much.”

More than 6,400 Yazidi women and children were sold into slavery after IS captured Sinjar. Another 5,000 Yazidis were killed in what the United Nations called a genocide.

hands on the floor

Abu Shuja, who coordinated Bahar’s rescue, was not the only one concerned about women and children abducted by IS.

Businessman Bahzad Fahran, who lived outside IS-controlled areas, founded a group called Kinyat to rescue Yazidi women and children and report on the crimes of IS fighters.

Kinyat discovered that IS fighters bought and sold kidnapped Yazidi women online, particularly via Telegram. “We infiltrated these groups under borrowed names or with names of IS members,” says Bahzad.

He points to the printout of frames from Telegram conversations he has hanging on his walls. One of them is in English promoting a girl for sale: “12 years old, not a virgin, very beautiful”.

It cost $13,000 and was in Raqqa, Syria. Then he showed me the photo of the girl posing suggestively on a leather sofa.

what’s coming

The overall future of the Yazidis remains uncertain.

“The Yazidis have been under attack for centuries and many of the Muslim population still believe they must convert or die,” said Haider Elias, the head of one of the largest Yazidi support organizations, Yazda.

“That’s why we believe that IS represents neither the big picture nor the end of itand that is a great fear for the Yazidis.”

Of the 300,000 Yazidis who fled IS by leaving their homes in Sinjar, nearly half – including Bahar – still live in tent camps in Iraq’s Kurdish region..

They cannot return to their homes in the Sinjar district as it has been almost completely destroyed, and its strategic location on the Iraq-Syria border has now made it a dangerous area, where militias who came to fight IS fight among themselves. .

Elias says the community is afraid of ever being the victim of another massacre and that many Yazidis emigrate for this reason. “A sense of security is very important to them. It’s a big topic. They don’t feel safe.”

Buying Bahar’s freedom cost about $20,000. She is now 40 years old, but she looks older, most of her hair, which remains under a veil, is covered with gray.

He has lived in the camp for eight years since his rescue. Sitting on a thin mattress on the floor of her tent, she pulls out a plastic folder with photos of her missing relatives.

Bahar has been very ill – both physically and mentally – not knowing what happened to her husband or eldest son, and processing the trauma of being raped several times.

Her children stay with her, but she says they are still in shock and fear.

“My daughter has injuries from the beatings she endured,” she says. “I have to keep fighting and keep going. But right now, and the way things are, we’re like the walking dead.”