Enslaving Yazidis: Witness
stories of ISIS sex slaves
The fifty-something woman with the freckled face is oblivious
to our presence. She is in a distant dream. The window
shutters slam shut and a glass falls to the floor, but she
remains still, in a pool of sunlight with a thousand dancing
specks. “I see them always,” she utters as if talking to a
ghost, “You don’t see them, my dear.”
That was my first meeting with Jamila, an Iraqi woman
delivered from the suffering of the “daughters of Adam,” as
she calls them. “They are still there, in the black hole,” she
says.
For thirty-three years, Jamila worked at the Civil Registry
Office in Mosul. “I did not have good fortune and never
married,” she confides. When ISIS seized the city in June
2014, she fled with a Yazidi colleague to the village of Kocho
(some 25 km south of the town of Sinjar) and stayed there with
its residents for around two months. “A cruel and harrowing
fate awaited all of us.”
ISIS fighters laid siege to Kocho (also known as Kuju) for ten
days and demanded that the residents convert to Islam as a
condition of release. During this time, the village’s men and
its Mukhtar gathered to discuss and negotiate the militants’
ultimatum. In the end, most of them refused conversion,
suggesting instead to leave their homes and possessions behind
in exchange for safe passage out. The residents grew agitated
and at noon on the 13th of August, 2014 a group of fourteen
families – mainly women and children – decided to flee.
Jamila remembers how on that day mothers had added sleeping
medicine to their children’s milk. “We left with nothing but
two cell phones that girls hid between their breasts, the
clothes on our back, and the water that the men carried.”
Nine young men accompanied the families to guide their way.
They walked in the oppressive heat and humidity and entered a
dried-up qanat (irrigation canal) overgrown with reeds and
papyrus plants. The mothers’ hands were resting on their
children’s lips, terrified that they would wake up and begin
to scream. The men, women and children had been walking for
half an hour before they were suddenly surrounded on all sides
by ISIS militants. The captors forced them out of the qanat
and separated the men from the women. They used their portable
radios to signal to other fighters who immediately arrived in
pickup trucks. Then they loaded the women and girls onto the
trucks and returned the men to the qanat after they had
checked adolescent boys for armpit hair. The boys were ordered
to take off their shirts and raise their arms and those with
underarm hair were deemed old enough to join the men in the
qanat.
“They took five small boys because they had started to grow
hair,” she says. “As the trucks started to move and take us
away we heard the sound of heavy gunfire rising from the heart
of the qanat.”
The trucks drove for half an hour, stopping in an area crowded
with other abducted women and children. There, the captives
were counted and “allotted” to different commanders and then
packed onto big white busses with the word Hajj painted in
blue on its sides. “We were registered under the name Abu alQa’qa’ al-Hadrami,” Jamila recounts. There were sixty-one
women and children in her group who were later joined by six
other women from al-Hatimiyah village.
Her words come with difficulty. “They refused to give us
water…the busses had no curtains or air-conditioning.”
They arrived to Tal Afar Airport (in northern Iraq) before
sunset where each commander was waiting for his prisoners and
where another savage separation took place. Boys over the age
of eight were severed from their mothers. The anguished wails
were only silenced by bullets. “God Almighty, by bullets,” she
cries out. “‘Warda,’ a mother, was murdered while she was
holding her son as they tried to tear him away.” After they
had also separated the older women (age sixty and above) from
the group, thirty-six females, including young girls, and
seven boys under eight years remained. They spent the night at
the airport only to awaken to another bus arriving in the
morning.
“They ordered us to stand up and they searched us. They seized
all our money and gold and the two cell phones, and then they
photographed us individually and gave us numbers. It was here,
here, that I first heard the word ‘sabaya’ (war booty slaves).
It was around ten a.m. on August 14, 2014,” Jamila says.
The bus travelled in a small convoy along a desolate road,
flanked by a pickup truck in the front and a vehicle carrying
a machine gun from the back. “We did not know our direction or
where they were taking us,” she continues. “We stopped twice
on the road to relieve ourselves. They insisted that the place
had no cover and forced us to pee in front of them. We were
forced to devise a way to conceal ourselves.” She explains how
they stood in threes and fours to shelter the women and girls
who needed it especially the ones wearing pants.
“They gave each of us one meal. A sandwich and a water bottle
that was scorching hot from the sun.”
That evening, they entered a big city of bright lights and
wide streets planted with palm trees down the middle. The
children jumped from window to window in excitement as the bus
continued until it reached a building with iron fencing and a
large courtyard. The bus stopped and a band of masked men
encircled the women and children and herded them into the
building. They took them down to a basement, its rooms on the
left side, and into a large chamber with metal bars for its
front wall and a heap of mattresses and blankets piled in one
of its corners. They closed the metal door which faced an
outstretched corridor and left. The women took to exploring
the hall and discovered a door at its end which led to a small
kitchen and three toilets – in those moments a great treasure!
“Everyone collapsed to sleep out of exhaustion. ‘Golsha,’ my
Yazidi friend and I were careful to take turns; we would cover
one woman and wake up another because her child was crying.
Masked men came a few times to gape at us through the bars as
though we were animals in a cage. They would mutter amongst
themselves and then leave. I don’t know how I fell asleep… I
awoke to the voice of one of the masked men calling out
‘Sabaya! Sabaya!’ and the loud banging of his rifle against
the bars. He had brought us some soap, shampoo, and sanitary
pads as well as diapers,” she tells us.
The man ordered everyone to shower within two hours and shut
the door behind him. “Some of the women bathed while others
refused,” Jamila continues. “We helped the mothers wash their
children and then we were brought food that was clearly halfeaten.” The younger girls recoiled from the meal, and Jamila
and the older women tried to pacify the complaints about the
food and managed to tempt the children to eat.
They heard the call to prayer although they could not make out
which of the daily summons it was when suddenly three cloaked
women armed with rifles and accompanied by five guards barged
in on them. One of women carried a camera while the the other
two held notebooks and papers. They asked the guards to close
the door at the end of the long corridor and not to allow
anyone in other than Abu Abdullah al-Amni. They also asked
them to bring a table and five chairs. As soon as the chairs
were brought and the door shut, the women removed their
‘abayas’. “We saw they were women just like us!” Jamila
exclaims, adding that one of them was wearing a suicide vest.
“We were overcome with relief, for they were women and most
likely had children and families.”
The leader looked at the captives whose gazes were fixed on
her, and the moment she allowed them to speak they all
clamoured to tell their story, approaching the three women
with both excitement and fear. Without warning, one of them
fired a shot in the air causing the women to stumble backwards
over each other and their children. The leader then ordered
them to their knees and started to speak in broken classical
Arabic, revealing that she was not Arab.
“She asked us if we spoke Arabic so I stepped forward and said
that the majority did not, so she asked ‘which language do you
speak, infidels?’ and I responded ‘Kurdish, but I can
translate for them and I also speak English.’ She then talked
to me in English and at her request I explained to her our
story from start to finish,” Jamila relates the conversation.
Afterwards, the leader demanded that each woman and her family
stand in line from oldest to youngest, and they were all
photographed and registered in this manner. “Because I had no
family I stood alone,” she explains. The leader, ‘Um Layth,’
was surprised to discover that Jamila was a Muslim Sunni and
questioned her heavily in a mix of Arabic and English. Who had
brought her here? Was she the wife of one of the Sahawat
fighters? And so on. “I answered her in clear English and she
listened intently. Her verdict was that I was a sabiya like
the other sabaya,” she goes on adding that the leader made
this decision with the help of Abu Abdullah al-Amni who had
recently joined them. “He said ‘he who helps the infidel even
to sharpen a pencil is one of them.’ But despite that they
used me as a translator.”
The female captives were divided by age group (ages 12 to 18,
ages 19 to 25, ages 26 to 30, ages 31 to 40, ages 41 to 50,
and ages 51 and over), were assigned numbers and photographed
again, one by one. Then they separated little girls under age
12 into one group and little boys from ages 3 to 8 into
another group.
“Go ahead, try to imagine what happened as they tore the
children away from their mothers’ embrace,” she tells me. “You
can’t. It’s hard for anyone to imagine that there are people
this cruel. Their hearts did not soften when the mothers wept
and the children screamed – they (the children) who are
innocent in all that was happening.”
They took the children away and left. “The silence and the
pain remained. And so much weeping and suffering. Do you know
of suffering?” she asks me. I nod but she takes no notice and
continues. “We lost four girls older than 5, younger than 12
and six boys older than 3, younger than 8. We had four boys
left who were under 3 years of age and four girls under 5
years.”
The captured women only knew the time from the call to prayer.
That one signalled the morning, that one the afternoon and so
on. Jamila’s calculations were based on the long interval that
follows the evening call to prayer. If accurate, it would mean
that the women had already spent eight days there. They had no
visitors except those who came to bring food or to peer at
them in their monkey cage.
After the noon call to prayer on the eighth day, Um Layth
reappeared with three more female captives and left them with
the women. They were Syrians from the town of Deir al-Zour.
“Two days later they took me alone to a big office and told me
to tell the women that they are in al-Raqqa, that they are
sabaya and will be distributed and sold to emirs and fighters
in the organization – those who were favoured by God to
conquer Sinjar and purge it of infidels and polytheists. They
(the men) will convert them to Islam and save them from the
fires of hell if they prove to be dutiful,” she says.
The next morning, Um Layth and Abu Abdullah al-Amni arrived
with five other women and they separated virgins from married
women. Jamila noticed that Um Layth and her female companions
did not wear their Abayas in Abu Abdullah’s presence. “Um
Layth was not ashamed when she asked us intimate questions
under that glaring light that was attached to the table. Those
who refused to respond were flogged by her companions,”
continues Jamila.
“Are you a virgin?”
“Have you ever had sex?”
“When is the date of your menstrual cycle?”
“Do you suffer from any sexually transmitted diseases?”
“Your name will be changed. (Here is a list with female
Islamic names) Which name do you choose?”
These were some of the questions that the virgin women were
asked. The married ones were similarly questioned.
“When was the date of your last menstrual cycle?”
“How many times have you given birth?”
“How many times a week did you have intercourse with your
husband?”
“What are some of your skills?”
“Your name will be changed. Which one do you choose?”
“Do you suffer from any sexually transmitted diseases?”
The women whose names were “strange” to Um Layth and Abu
Abdullah were given new ones and told to memorize them. Their
pleas about their abducted children went unanswered.
After the noon prayer, Um Layth and her companions returned
and ordered the women to stand in line again. Shortly after, a
band of masked men came down and the virgin girls were ushered
outside to the long corridor where the men proceeded to
“inspect the goods.” The six young girls were instructed to
remove their headscarves as Um Layth marketed them.
“It was clear from Um Layth and Abu Abdullah’s behavior that
there was an important man in the group,” Jamila says and
cries out “I shall never forget, I swear, the faces of those
young girls who were looking towards us as they were dragged
off. One of them was thirteen years old. Imagine! Thirteen! It
wasn’t enough for them to kill kidnap displace…they hounded
their flesh. Do you know of suffering? Suffering is over there
and only there.”
My colleague whose tears are racing Jamila’s explodes in
expletives, cursing everyone and everything.
Another evening prayer passed, followed by a morning one, then
came the noon prayer and a similar scene ensued. They took out
the three married and childless women, but this time the
buyers were fewer in number and less enthused, and Um Layth
did not put on a show. Again, beseeching eyes were met with
silence.
Nine more calls to prayer and no visitors except those who
came to bring food or stare at the monkey cage.
“Other than the separation, the children’s requests were the
most painful part. They had turned the corner of mattresses
into a play area and the word “bav” (that they would utter),
which means daddy, cut to our core … do you know of
suffering?” she asks again.
At some point during the night or day, two guards and one of
Um Layth’s companions came again for Jamila and led her to the
same office as before. “I realized it was the afternoon,” she
says. Jamila was told to inform the women that they will soon
be moved to another location. “They made me sit with them. Yes
with them, I swear! I was physically closer to one of them
more than any other time” she exclaims. The men were
discussing the new site and the facilities it will need
including housing for the sabaya, new quarters for the
fighters who buy them, showrooms, and minibuses to transport
them. They also talked about the new price list that was
recently circulated.
Displaced Iraqi families from the Yazidi community. (Reuters).
“They didn’t offer me the coffee in the cup they were passing
around, but gave me coffee in a plastic cup instead. Oh how I
would have liked a cigarette! Our prices ranged between one
banknote and twenty, a banknote being the equivalent of $100,
and rated according to age and attractiveness,” she explains.
There were nine new captured women by the time Jamila had
returned to the chamber, eight Yazidis and a Christian. Um
Layth and her companions came to register and photograph the
new captives and left. Three evening prayer calls later, on
the seventh of September (according to the women’s estimate),
the door opened and they were all ordered to stand in line. A
big yellow bus was waiting outside the main door to the
building. “We saw the stars… although it was only for a short
moment between the door and the bus. We saw the stars!” she
repeats.
The bus crossed a large bridge and after a short drive through
two parallel rows of trees, they disembarked. “There was air
and stars and croaking frogs,” she says. The women were led
into a building that had a big hall and taken down to the
basement. Its heavy door opened into a single large chamber
and newly built kitchen and bathrooms. There were small
rectangular windows (no bigger than 30 x 50cm) along the top
of the wall just under the ceiling.
“We tried to listen for the prayer calls to keep count of the
days, but there was no sound but the croaking of the frogs. So
we invented a new way of telling time, for frogs croak at
night and not during the day,” she says.
The croaking stopped. The first visitors, Um Layth and her
flogging squad, entered with four other men and laid a body at
the door, wrapped in a black ‘abaya’ as in a shroud. They took
two of the three Syrian captives and left. As soon as the door
shut the women opened the black shroud and stared in horror.
“It was Hivin, the girl who was so merry! Her hair was
completely shaved off like a soldier and eyes bulged out with
terror. She was half-naked. Do you know of suffering?” Jamila
repeats.
Hivin’s body was covered with burns from melted nylon, a mass
of bruises and cuts. She had a circular gash, the work of a
knife, around her genitals. The women helped her into the
bathroom but she pushed them out screaming, “Leave me alone!
Leave me alone.” An hour later, the women entered the bathroom
to find her lying in a pool of blood, the poker from the
bathroom’s diesel heating stove plunged into her heart.
“This is suffering,” Jamila says and she rolls a cigarette
with tobacco from a black plastic bag. She is silent for a
long time as she blows out her cigarette smoke.
“You know…they even treated their own women as sabaya! More
than one of the ‘Muhajireen’ fighters would lock up his wife
with us for days and threaten to sell her as a slave to punish
her,” she finally says.
The days went by with the croaking of the frogs and the taking
of women. Only some were returned. “I feel shame in my
humanity,” she says. “You ask what happened to the girls. I’ll
tell you of ‘Amsha’ whose lot was ‘Abu Jarir.’ This is her
story.”
Amsha was hauled off in a white pickup after the fighter Abu
Jarir paid ten banknotes for her and quarreled with the man
who sits behind the desk over the number of sex slaves he was
allowed to buy. According to the regulations, Abu Jarir was
permitted no more than three slaves but he insisted that the
Muhajireen fighters were entitled to more. He then signed a
paper and dragged Amsha to his car.
The pickup drove through streets where all the women walking
in the souks were enveloped in black and looked the same. Abu
Jarir took Amsha to a yellow building on a wide street and up
three flights of stairs into an apartment. When the door
closed Amsha begged him to let her go, pleading that she had a
family and a life back home but Abu Jarir ignored her as he
went from room to room. He turned on the air conditioning and
moved some light stands to another room. He then took out a
bag from a closet and threw it in Amsha’s face. He pointed his
finger and the first thing he said was “the bathroom is over
there” before he dragged her there by her hair. In the
bathroom, he tore away her clothes. It was the first time that
a man had seen her naked.
She kicked and thrashed with arms and legs and even tried to
bite him but he was too strong. He carried her and threw her
in the tub which was lined with bottles and packages. There
were light stands and two cameras, one directed at the tub and
the other at the large mirror on the wall facing it. He mixed
so many kinds of shampoo that the foam spilled over the edge
of the tub and covered the floor. She tried to drown herself
when he left for a moment, but he returned with a whip and and
beat her all over her body and then wrapped her in a towel and
carried her to a big bed in another room. There were cameras
fixed to the ceiling and directly over the bed and two others
strapped to either of its sides. He laid her in the middle of
the bed and dressed her in undergarments that looked like
dancewear which he took out of the bag. He shut the door and
curtains and chained her to the bed and then knelt to pray.
After he finished, he adjusted the cameras while he mumbled a
rap song and danced his way from camera to light stand. He
took off his clothing piece by piece. It was also the first
time that Amsha had seen a naked man.
When he unchained her, she struck him in the eye and kicked
him hard between the legs, but he was unfazed and continued
humming and swaying. He went on to tie her hands and legs to
the bed and mounted her. She fainted and would come to
sometimes only to feel his breath and teeth raping her more
strongly than when he raped her between her legs. Amsha did
not know how much time had passed when she woke up. She saw
her captor brushing his hair in front of the mirror, naked and
water dripping off him and her blood covering her legs and the
bedsheets. He carried her again like a rag and laid her in the
tub. For the next three days, he prayed, flogged, filmed and
raped her. On the fourth day, he gave her a glass of water and
watched her drugged body lose consciousness. She only heard
the sound of the front door closing.
“You will not understand what suffering means. This is how her
life with him dragged on while the croaking of the frogs came
and went more than seventy times. He returned her broken in
body and spirit, addicted to drugs and pregnant,” Jamila .
The dinner that Jamila has served turns cold but none of us
touch it. She carries the plates away and arranges them in a
small fridge in the corner of her tiny room.
“Are you weary?” I ask her and she responds “No, my dear,
weariness is over there!”
Several days later, they came to take Amsha again. “I
volunteered myself instead and so did another woman. I swear
we volunteered ourselves but they refused. They said they were
going to take her to a doctor because of the pregnancy, but
they never returned her,” she says.
Jamila discovered that there were several other locations
where sabaya were being held captive. She found this out while
donating blood, a task she was forced to do more than once.
One of those times, she sensed a kindness from one of the
nurses and something of remorse. The nurse took several tries
to insert the needle in Jamila’s vein and turning her back to
the guards she told her that she too had had been a victim
with another girl at a site called ‘Al Primo Bank.’ When
Jamila asked her about the site, the nurse said there were
five others like it.
One morning, Jamila was summoned to the office upstairs. There
were three men and two women there and she was told to take a
seat. “Is there anyone in your family you could contact to buy
you?” they asked her. “I took courage and said ‘But I am a
Sunni Muslim and it is not permissible by Islamic law to sell
me as a slave,’ but they mocked me for speaking about Islamic
law and I had to swallow their insults and humor them by
smiling,” she says.
There was a knock on the door and ‘Ghazala,’ the only
Christian captive among their group, was ushered in. One of
them handed Jamila a piece of paper to give to Ghazala since
he was not permitted to give it to her directly according to a
man with a fat belly. Jamila was also told to translate to
Ghazala a text that was marked in black from a magazine in
English. She still remembers the words and tells me to search
for the magazine to verify it.
“The ‘People of the Book,’ like the Christians and the Jews
have two choices: either to pay the jizya tax or to convert to
Islam; however, this does not apply to Yazidis.” (This
statement can be found in Arabic in the ISIS’s ‘Dabiq’
magazine, the October issue in 2014). Ghazala’s family had
paid the jizya tax and they were going to return her to them
that day.
“They also gave me two hundred dollar bills and a certificate
of emancipation,” Jamila says. They told her to choose her
destination and when she heard that Ghazala will be taken to
Tal Abyad and from there would cross to Turkey where her
family was waiting, she told them “like her.”
“They really did take us to Tal Abyad, and we crossed the
borders. And here I am,” Jamila says at the end of her story.
“But I will go back. Here no one needs me. Over there they
need me, and my conscience tortures me because I felt happy
about my freedom and was selfish. I thought only of myself.”
I tell her that I am going to publish her story and that they
will know that she is planning on returning.
“Let them know! Let the world know!” she cries out and refuses
to say another word.
“We will be in touch, sir,” she says it firmly and offers her
hand in goodbye.