Khalida (Photo: Daniel Leal-Olivas/MailOnline)
By Mark Ellis
A 20-year-old Yazidi woman was bought and sold as a sex-slave eight
times by various ISIS fighters and endured repeated rapes at the hands
of her captors.
After her capture by ISIS, Khalida and 800 other enslaved women were
put on display in Raqqa as if they were in a ‘car showroom.’ The
captives were sold for as little as $20 or exchanged for mobile phones,
according to a report by the Daily Mail.
She broke her silence to tell the world about her people’s awful predicament.
Her nightmare began in 2014 when her family were condemned as
‘unbelievers’ by former neighbors as they tried to flee their hometown
of Sinjar after it was overrun by ISIS fighters.
“Our neighbors, who are Muslims, said they would protect us, but when
we were stopped at a checkpoint one of them pointed us out to the
foreign [ISIS] fighters and said we were Yazidi. And we were all taken.
There were 36 of us,” she told The Daily Mail.
The family were separated by sex and Khalida doesn’t know what happened to the men in her family.
ISIS leaders divided the women between the married and unmarried.
Khalida and her cousins – along with 800 other young Yazidi women — were
taken by bus to the ISIS capital of Raqqa.
They
passed through her destroyed town on the way. “I saw dead bodies –
children, women and men – along the roadside. My eyes were scarred by
what I saw and I had to hold my nose against the stench,” she told The
Daily Mail.
In Raqqa the women were paraded around in a large room. “We were put
on display. Men came in and looked at us like objects. It was like a car
showroom. Women were bought for cash – as little as $20, or exchanged
for things like mobile phones, or given away as gifts,” she recalled.
‘The most beautiful women were put into a special room. Then five top
ISIS leaders – emirs – came to choose girls. They took away three or
four girls each.”
Khalida and her cousin were bought by an older man with a white
beard, Abu Qalla. He locked the young women in a room for the first two
weeks, where they could hear his wife and children interact.
Then one day Abu Qalla raped Khalida’s cousin in front of her. His
wife later beat the girls, accusing them of ‘tempting her husband’ and
branding the pair as ‘infidels’.
“The wife said: ‘You are Yazidi. You deserve what you get.’”
Khalida endured 16 months of daily abuse and was eventually bought
and sold by eight different men. She was raped up to three times a day
and was left unconscious after she was gang raped.
She was force-fed contraceptive pills and once taken to hospital for a
contraceptive injection after she became unconscious after one
particularly brutal gang rape.
“They [ISIS] did not want me get pregnant, especially if there was
more than one man because they would not know who the father of the baby
was,” she told The Daily Mail.
She attempted suicide several times to end her terrible torment and
even tattooed her father’s name on her arm so her body could be
identified after her death.
“I tried to kill myself many times. I covered myself in water and put
my hand on electric cables but I always survived. I asked God to kill
me. I thought it was better to die than to live as a sex slave with what
they were doing to me every day.”
She tried to escape three times, running desperately to the homes of
three Arab families and appealing to them to contact her family. “I told
them, help me, get me out of here and my family will give you anything
you want, name your price,” she told The Daily Mail.
“But they said: ‘You are Yazidi, an infidel, we refuse to help you.”’
Khalida (Credit: Daniel Leal-Olivas/MailOnline)
Finally, Khalida pleaded for mercy from her final slave master. “I
begged him and kissed his feet begging for him to contact my family,’
Khalida told The Daily Mail.
“I told him I had been enslaved for over a year and had heard nothing
about my family. I begged him every day for two months. Finally he let
me call my brother Faisal. He told him he would sell me for $30,000.”
“I told him my family were poor and had nothing, that they had
abandoned their home. I had to barter for my life. Finally he agreed to
sell me,” for $24,000.
The man took Khalida to a village near the front line in Mosul. “I
had to walk for five hours and I called to the Peshmerga fighters,” she
recounted.
Khalida finally made her way to safety. She says she will not let her 16-month ordeal define her life.
“Before the war I had a happy life. I lived with my family, helping
my mother around the house with the cooking and the cleaning. Now my
dream is to be able to read and write, because I was not able to go to
school when I was young.”
Source: Godreports