They Killed My Brother, Married Me Off To An ISIS Fighter - 14-Year-Old Girl Tells Her Horrible

 

A 14-year-old Yazidi girl has told of her horrible experience in the hands of Jihadists from the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) to a journalist named Mohammed A. Salih who is based in Erbil and has covered the conflict in northern Iraq for several international news organizations.

Recounting her ordeal, she said on August 3, as the sun rose over her village, Tel Uzer, a quiet spot on the western Nineveh plains of Iraq, they got alert from relatives that members of ISIS were coming for them and they quickly fled out of the town on foot, taking only clothes and some valuables, Washington Post reports.


They stopped to drink water from a well in the heart of the desert after about an hour of trekking. Suddenly, they found themselves surrounded by militants wearing Islamic State uniforms. They were divided into groups, based on their gender and age.
She said: “One for young and capable men, another for girls and young women, and a third for older men and women. The jihadists stole cash and jewelry from this last group, and left them alone at the oasis. Then they placed the girls and women in trucks. As they drove us away, we heard gunshots. Later we learned that they were killing the young men, including my 19-year old brother, who had married just six months ago.”
They were taken to an empty school in Baaj, a little town west of Mosul near the Syrian border, where they met many other Yazidi women who had been captured by Islamic State. They were told to recite the Muslim creed – “I testify that there is no God but Allah, and that Muhammad is his prophet” – which would make them Muslims but they refused, which got the Islamists furious.

“Every now and then, an Islamic State man would come in and tell us to convert, but each time we refused. As faithful Yazidis, we would not abandon our religion. We wept a lot and mourned the losses suffered by our community,” she explained.

One day, the married women were separated from the unmarried ones. She and her childhood friend were given as gifts to two Islamic State members from the south, near Baghdad. The men drove them to their home in Fallujah.
The man she was given to, nick named Abu Ahmed, tried to rape her several times, but she did not allow him to touch her in any sexual way, prompting him to beat her every day, punching and kicking her to the point that she and her friend started to consider committing suicide.

On how they managed to escape, she said on the sixth day after their arrival in Fallujah, Abu Ahmed left for business in Mosul and in the evening the next day, Abu Hussein, the man her childhood friend, Shayma (fictitious name) was given to, went to the mosque for prayers, leaving them alone in the house.
They quickly made a call to a friend of Shayma’s cousin, Mahmoud who lived in Fallujah, for help. They then broke the locks of the doors using kitchen knives and meat cleavers. Wearing traditional long black abayas they found in the house, they walked through the town which was quiet for evening prayers until Mahmoud came and picked them up on the street and took them to his home.

The next morning, he took them on a two-hour ride to Baghdad, after giving them fake student IDs in case they were stopped at checkpoints. In Baghdad, they met with Yazidi and Muslim Kurdish family friends who helped them procure another pair of fake ID cards that enabled them board a flight to Irbil, the capital of Kurdistan in the north.

“After staying in Irbil overnight at the house of a Yazidi member of the Iraqi parliament, Vian Dakhil, we traveled north to Shekhan, to the residence of Baba Sheikh, the spiritual leader of the world’s Yazidis,” the girl recounted.

Expressing joy over her freedom, she said: “After so much fear for so many days, hugging my dad again was the best moment of my life. He said he had cried for me every day since I disappeared. That evening, we went to Khanke, where my mother was staying with her relatives. We hugged and kept crying until then I fainted. My month-long ordeal was over, and I felt reborn.”

According to her, she still has nightmares and wants to leave the country altogether. She said: “This country is no place for me anymore. I want to go to a place where I might be able to start over, if that is even possible.”