The women who escaped the horrors of Islamic State

Memory loss. Nightmares. The trauma of being captured by Islamic State lies deep with the Yazidi girls in the camps around Duhok in Iraqi Kurdistan. Ala Lattif of the new Iraqi Kurdish women’s magazine Zhin, spoke to the girls who escaped the clutches of IS

By Ala Lattif, Zhin Magazine

“It is better for us not to sleep so that we may spare ourselves of the nightmares of Islamic State.” The seventeen-year-old girl sits on the ground in an old school building, her new home. Her head down, the people around her watch her in silence. She was the only survivor from a family of eight. The story of her escape is a long one.

For many of the girls that we meet, words that can describe their ordeal are hard to find. For the Yazidi girls, the foreign airstrikes against Islamic State (IS) provided an opportunity for escape. Now, residing in refugee camps in Iraqi Kurdistan, they try to rebuild their lives. But how do you move on when IS haunts you every living moment of the day and penetrates your dreams at night?

“I think of my family and relatives. They were all either raped or tortured and beaten. Then there were the insults against our religion. I try to sleep no more than two hours at night. If I could, I would never go to sleep,” says the seventeen-year-old girl.

The girls live in camps or shelters with their families or with other families who have taken them in. Like many of the other refugees, they have nowhere to access the proper psychological or medical care that they need to help them deal with their traumatic experiences. Those who have not found shelter in the informal camp areas in and around Duhok have sought refuge in the many unfinished buildings destined to become apartments before IS began their attacks in June 2014. Others have settled temporarily in the camps managed by international relief agencies where each tent comes with blankets and has access to electricity and toilets.

“Islamic State took the girls back and forth between Tal Afar and Sinjar [between the city of Mosul and the border with Syria] to find a place to imprison them. I have seen with my own eyes how corpses were thrown on the ground and eaten by dogs.”

“As long as there were children to take as hostage, adults were ignored. Two times they put a rifle to my head and threatened to kill me. They would have pulled the trigger, had my sister not interfered and pleaded for my life.”

They were under constant surveillance to ensure they would not attempt to commit suicide, says the seventeen-year-old-girl.

It is clear that it will take the girls and young women many years to overcome their traumatic experiences. Mental and psychological support is not common in Iraqi Kurdistan, even less so for women who are victims of abuse. As we try to collect the names of the refugees and how they escaped, we know we will never get the full story behind their escape.

In the crowded old school building outside Duhok city, a large number of Yazidi people reside. One of them is a girl who arrived just before we did. She is 13 years old and her family won’t tell us her name. She and 17 other girls related to the family were taken by Islamic State from their village Kojo close to Sinjar close to the Syrian border.

Islamic State arrived in Kojo in early August 2014. According to the refugees we spoke to, they executed all male inhabitants in the village and took the women as their hostages. The thirteen-year-old girl had three brothers who were executed on the spot. A fourth brother, who she now lives with, managed to escape.

We meet the girl, who sits in the corner of a noisy, crowded classroom. Most of our questions are answered with either ‘yes’ or ‘no’. While we talk to her, she plays with her scarf that hangs loosely around her shoulders. When asked if she was physically assaulted, she avoids eye contact and softly replies, ‘no’. Her brother interferes and changes the subject.

The girl does not know what happened to the rest of the girls she was abducted alongside. We want to know how the girl is managing after her ordeal, but she insists that she is okay. She says that she was kept in a room with other girls and that they were treated well as long as they converted to Islam. Her body language seems to convey another story and her hands shake when she speaks about the other girls. How some of the girls were removed from the group and brought back hours later and how some of the girls were taken away to be sold. She insists that she was the only one to remained untouched.

Among the Yazidis, the issue of sexual assault of women is tied to great stigma and could be seen by her relatives as bringing shame and dishonour to the family.

Freeshta Kawa, a psychologist in a hospital in Iraqi Kurdistan, explains that the women are helpless against the repercussions of the physical attacks against them and reintegration into the family after their abductions is often very difficult.

“There is nothing we can do for the women psychologically, since most of them remain silent. We have no idea what they have endured since most of them refuse to tell us their stories as it clashes with their culture.

“It is hard to work with these women because of the pride that exists among their men. Their male relatives feel they have been dishonoured by the capture, rape and torture of the women. ”

One of the members traveling with the Zhin magazine team to the camps, Ms Jwana Rahim, collaborates with Vital Voice, an organisations that works to empower women. Among the 42 cases that Jwana Rahim has noted down, only six of the women recounted stories of rape.

The brother who fled alongside his thirteen-year-old sister says they have promised themselves never to tell the story of how they escaped ‘so as not to risk the lives of others that IS has taken’.

When the airstrikes hit Tal Afar in early 2015, a group of women and their 12 children fled Islamic State to a camp near Duhok. They have no knowledge of what happened to the rest of their families. Two sisters held captive shaved off their eyebrows and put grease and soil on their faces in an effort to look dirty and unappealing to avoid being raped. Their efforts were in vain.

The youngest of the sisters told her captors that she was pregnant. Threatening to kill her if she was lying, they took her to a hospital to get her tested. The test proved she was indeed pregnant. She had married just a month before.

She tells her story with tears streaming down her face. She says she was waiting for airstrikes so she could try and escape, even if it meant she would die trying.

Some of the Yazidi women who managed to Islamic State and who have since been reunited with their relatives in camps across the Nineveh province were initially not accepted back into their families. Only when Yazidi leaders ordered the families to take them back were they accepted their male family members.

“The women say that they are okay and choose to be silent. Obviously they are not okay and it is clear they suffering psychologically,” says Jwana Rahim.

Zhin Magazine is supported by International Media Support (IMS) as part of our work to promote independent, professional journalism in Iraq and Iraqi Kurdistan and to provide a platform for expression for women in a society where representation in, and production of, media is otherwise dominated almost entirely by men.