2023-07-10 14:01:18
Getty Images Yazidi girls in a refugee camp.
In 2014, thousands of Yazidi women and children were enslaved by the radical Islamic State (IS) group in Iraq and Syria. His fellow Yazidis began a rescue operation almost immediately, but today, almost a decade later, the task is not complete.
In November 2015, Bahar and his three young children were sold for the fifth time.
She was one of many Yazidi women who were taken prisoner by IS when the group entered her village in the Sinjar district of northern Iraq 18 months earlier.
The Yazidis are a religious and ethnic minority that have lived in Iraq for more than 6,000 years, but were labeled “infidels” by the self-styled Islamic State..
The group had already taken her husband and eldest son. She believes they were shot and buried in a mass grave.
Bahar remembers how she and other children were all lined up in a room, crying because they thought they were going to be beheaded. The reality is that they were being sold.
That’s when the real horror began.
BBC Bahar Elias spent 18 months as a prisoner and slave of the group calling itself Islamic State.
Slavery
Bahar says he had to serve IS fighters, becoming your property.
“I had to act like I was his wife, whenever they wanted. They could hit me if they wanted to.” His children were all under 10 years old and they all beat them too. One of her daughters was hit in the face with a rifle butt.
Its fourth “owner” was a Tunisian named Abu Khattab. “We stayed in his house, but he lent me to others so that I could work as a cleaner in two other IS bases. In all those places, I went to work, I went to clean and they raped me..
“And there were air raids all the time. IS fighters were running everywhere, getting weapons or hiding from the shelling. It was chaos, it was worse than a nightmare.”
One day, when Bahar and her children were at Abu Khattab’s house, a car with tinted windows pulled up to the site. The driver was dressed in black and had a long beard, he didn’t look any different from any of the other IS fighters.
Bahar realized that she was being sold again, along with her children..
Overwhelmed with the situation, Bahar yelled at the man to kill her, she just couldn’t take it anymore.
But what happened next changed everything.
BBC “Slave for sale, 12 years old, not a virgin, very beautiful, in Raqqa, $13,000.”
A cinematographic rescue
As they drove away, the driver told them, “I’m taking you somewhere else.” Bahar didn’t know what was happening or whether to trust the man, and she began to get anxious.
The man gave Bahar the phone: it was the voice of Abu Shuja, a man renowned 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 would come, the code word would be “Sayeed”, and that she should go with him.
And so it was, someone arrived on a motorcycle and uttered the word. He told Bahar to get on the motorcycle 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 won’t recognize your Yazidi accent.”
Bahar says that the man took them to his house: “They were so kind to us there, we were able to bathe, they gave us food and painkillers and they told us: ‘you are safe now’”.
Another man took photos of Bahar and his children and sent them to Abu Shuja to make sure they were the right people. After, around 3 a.m., they woke up the family, telling them it was time to move again.
The man who owned the house where they were staying gave Bahar his mother’s identity card, and told her that if anyone asked her anything, she should say that she was taking her son to the doctor. “We went through several IS checkpoints, but they didn’t stop us at any of them.”
Finally, they reached a town on the border between Syria and Iraq and Bahar was received by Abu Shuja and his brother. “I was on the brink of collapse,” he says, “I don’t remember much beyond that.”
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.
BBC April, 2023: Bahar and her three children hold photos of their missing relatives.
hands on the ground
Abu Shuja, who coordinated Bahar’s rescue, was not alone in worrying about women and children kidnapped by IS.
Businessman Bahzad Fahran, who lived outside IS-controlled areas, set up a group called Kinyat to rescue Yazidi women and children and report on the crimes of IS fighters.
Kinyat learned that IS fighters were buying and selling kidnapped Yazidi women online, particularly through Telegram. “We infiltrated these groups under borrowed names or using the names of IS members,” says Bahzad.
He points to the printouts of frames from Telegram conversations that he has hanging on his walls. One of them is in English, and promotes 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.
BBC Bahzad Farhan created a group to rescue Yazidi women and children.
what’s coming
The overall future of the Yazidis remains uncertain.
“The Yazidis have been under attack for many centuries, and many of the Muslim population still believe that they should convert or die,” says Haider Elias, the head of one of the largest Yazidi support organizations, Yazda.
“That is why we believe that IS represents neither the big picture nor the end of thisand that is a great fear for the Yazidis.”
Of the 300,000 Yazidis who fled IS by leaving their homes in Sinjar, almost half – including Bahar – continue to live in tent camps in Iraq’s Kurdish region..
They cannot return to their homes in the Sinjar district because it has been almost completely destroyed, and its strategic position on the Iraq-Syria border has now made it dangerous territory, where militias that came to fight IS are fighting among themselves. to achieve supremacy.
Elias says the community is scared of being subjected to another massacre at any time and that, for this reason, many Yazidis are emigrating. “For them a sense of security is very important. It is a big topic. They don’t feel safe.”
Buying Bahar’s freedom cost about $20,000. He is now 40 years old, but he looks older, most of his hair, which remains under a veil, is covered in gray.
He has been living 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.
BBC Bahar looks at photos of her husband and eldest son, who are presumed killed by IS.
Bahar has been very ill – both physically and mentally – not knowing what happened to her husband or eldest son, and dealing with the trauma of having been raped on several occasions.
Her children remain with her, but she says they are still in shock and anxious all the time.
“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 now, we’re like the walking dead.”
BBC
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