Iraq News Now

Freed Yazidi woman in Syria endured years of Islamic State slavery

Freed Yazidi woman in Syria endured years of Islamic State slavery
Freed Yazidi woman in Syria endured years of Islamic State slavery

2019-03-10 00:00:00 - Source: Iraq News

Yazidi woman Salwa Sayed al-Omar, who escaped from the Islamic State, near the village of Baghouz, Deir Al Zor province, in Syria, March 7, 2019. Photo: Reuters

NEAR BAGHOUZ, Syria,— Salwa Sayed al-Omar spent years as a Yazidi prisoner of Islamic State but she escaped its clutches this week, fleeing its last populated enclave in east Syria along with two Iraqi boys pretending to be her brothers.

Islamic State overran the Yazidi faith’s heartland of Sinjar in northern Iraq in 2014, forcing young women into servitude as “wives” for its fighters and massacring men and older women.

The Yazidis are a religious sect whose beliefs combine elements of several ancient Middle Eastern religions. Islamic State considers them devil worshippers and its attacks on the group were condemned as a “genocide” by the United Nations.

“They took women, abused them and killed them,” said Omar, describing how jihadists bought and sold their Yazidi captives or passed them around as sexual slaves.

“A woman was shifted from one man to another unless it was to one who had a bit of mercy… if she was in good condition, she would carry on. If not, she would get married to avoid being abused,” she said.

Omar was eventually married to a Tajik jihadist.

As the U.S.-backed Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) besieged the enclave at Baghouz, some surviving Yazidi women and children emerged among many thousands of others fleeing deprivation and bombardment, including the group’s own unrepentant supporters.

The SDF is waiting to evacuate all civilians from the Baghouz enclave before forcing the remaining jihadists there to surrender or storming the tiny area by force.

Omar escaped along with two Iraqi children, Mustafa and Dia, who had been her neighbors for two years as their respective households moved through Syria together during Islamic State’s long retreat to Baghouz.

EATING GRASS

As Islamic State’s many enemies advanced against it, the group would move its captives from place to place. “They were hiding us in different places so we couldn’t be seen or helped,” Omar said.

Their Islamic State captors were “rigorous” in checking who left, said the teenage boys, Mustafa and Dia, who said they had stayed longer in the enclave to help Omar leave.

After a month of siege in the tiny pocket at Baghouz, a cluster of hamlets and farmland on the banks of the Euphrates at the Iraqi border, they were reduced to eating grass and hiding in holes when there was fighting, they said.

They all managed to get away from her “husband” by paying him money. Many Islamic State fighters remained in Baghouz as they left on Thursday, dug into tunnels under the area, the boys said.

Speaking in the desert outside Baghouz, where people who had left the enclave were searched, questioned and sorted between civilians and fighters, Omar spoke of how she had been captured.

“They took me from Iraq. They captured us on the road and said ‘we won’t do anything bad to you, but you must convert to Islam’. We were afraid to be killed so we converted,” she said.

It did not save them. After months of capture, the women were split from the men, whom she never saw again. Captured boys aged 7-15 were taken to be brainwashed and trained as Islamic State fighters, she said.

She was taken to Raqqa, the group’s Syrian “capital”, which fell to the SDF during Islamic State’s year of big defeats in 2017, and then down the Euphrates to Baghouz.

“Today I reached the democratic forces and they said ‘we will let you go out of the Islamic State’… and thank God, they helped me and let me out,” she said.

On August 3, 2014, Islamic State group has captured most parts of Sinjar district in northwest Iraq, a home to around 400,000 Yazidis, after Massoud Barzani’s KDP peshmerga forces withdrew from the area without a fight leaving behind the Yazidi civilians to IS killing and genocide.

An unpublished report by Iraq’s Kurdistan regional government KRG reportedly reveals that an 18,000 peshmerga forces of Massoud Barzani’s forces were on the spot and retreat without mounting any defense when Islamic state IS attacked the Yazidi area of Sinjar on August 3, 2014.

The Yazidis beg the KDP Peshmerga to at least leave them their weapons so as to give them a chance at defending themselves against IS militants, but the Peshmerga refuse, Yazidi refugees in Iraqi Kurdistan said in August 2014. Many Yazidis lost faith in Barzani when his forces failed to protect them from Islamic State militants, while the PKK and its Syrian sister party are widely seen as the Yazidis’ saviors.

Thousands of Kurdish families fled to Mount Sinjar, where they were trapped in it and suffered from significant lack of water and food, killing and abduction of thousands of Yazidis as well as rape and captivity of thousands of women.

More than 6,800 Yazidis were kidnapped, of which 4,300 either escaped or were bought as slaves, while 2,500 remain missing, according to reports.

According to Human Rights organizations, thousands of Yazidi Kurdish women and girls have been forced to marry or been sold into sexual slavery by the IS jihadists.

In August 2018, the Yazidis representative in the Iraqi Kurdistan’s Ministry of Religious Affairs and Endowments disclosed that 1,102 Yazidis remain missing.

The Yazidis are a Kurdish religious group linked to Zoroastrianism and Sufism. The religious has roots that date back to ancient Mesopotamia, are considered heretics by the hard-line Islamic State group.

Some 600,000 Yazidis live in villages in Iraqi Kurdistan region and in Kurdish areas outside Kurdistan region in around Mosul in Nineveh province, with additional communities in Transcaucasia, Armenia, Georgia, Turkey and Syria. Since the 1990s, the Yazidis have emigrated to Europe, especially to Germany.

There are almost 1.5 million Yazidis worldwide.

Copyright © 2019, respective author or news agency, Reuters | Ekurd.net

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