August 3, 2014, is etched in the memory of Yazidis worldwide as the day ISIS carried out one of the biggest genocides in modern history in the northern Iraqi province of Sinjar. Fearing persecution, as many as 4,00,000 Yazidis had fled to the neighbouring Kurdistan region of Iraq. Since Yazidis are non-Muslims, the Islamic State view them as ‘devil worshippers’ who ought to be converted and enslaved.
Thousands of hapless Yazidis took refuge on Mount Sinjar remaining stranded and on the verge of starvation until foreign forces intervened. Their plight was worsened following the withdrawal of Kurdish Peshmerga forces from the region.
As many as, 3000 to 5000 elderly Yazidi men and women who could not flee were brutally massacred by ISIS. Using sexual abuse as a weapon, approximately 7,000 Yazidi women and girls as young as nine were enslaved, forcefully converted to Islam, married off to ISIS soldiers, and moved around Iraq and eastern Syria.
In fact, according to reports, as many as 300 Yezidi women and girls from Iraq were distributed to ISIS fighters in Syria. In at least 27 cases, Islamic State supporters bought the women for $1,000 each, in order to marry them. The victims were described as “booty from the war with the infidels.”
Those who attempted to escape were brutally gang raped. The abducted boys, some of whom were as young as seven years old, were indoctrinated into Islam and used as child soldiers.
Though the exact number of the Yazidi killed by ISIS is still unknown, the Yezidi mass burial in Iraq’s Sinjar area bears witness to the horrors inflicted on them by their Islamist oppressors. Today, on August 3, 2022, eight years into the horrific genocide, we have tried to compile some of the worst testimonies of the cruelty and atrocities Islamic terrorists committed on Yazidi women and young girls.
ISIS cooks and feeds Yazidi woman her own 1-year-old son
On May 17, 2022, Twitter user Zidan Ismail (@zidan_yezidi) posted a Twitter thread, chronicling the ordeal faced by the Yazidis at the hands of the Islamic State. He shared a 2017 television interview wherein the Iraqi MP Vian Dakhill claimed that a Yazidi sex slave, whom they had managed to retrieve from ISIS had said that she was held in a cellar for three days without food or water. He further revealed that the ISIS terrorists forced her to eat her one-year-old child with rice.
The Yazidi woman, who was not named, was quoted as saying that she ate the food because she was very very hungry, but only after she had finished eating, they had said to her, “We cooked your one-year-old son that we took from you, and this is what you just ate.”
Yazidi survivor recalls how ISIS terrorist inked his name with a filthy needle on her hand
Twitter user Azzad Alsalem (@AzzatAlsaleem) took to Twitter on May 8, to share the ordeal of a Yazidi survivor. #YazidiGenocide survivor ‘I was sold 3 times when I was in IS captivity. Last IS terrorist who ensIaved me engraved his name on my hand with a filthy needle.I couldnt sleep from the pain of my swollen arm” After she survived she tattooed peacock on her arm,” read the Tweet.
10-year-old Yazidi raped to death in front of her father and other sisters
The Iraqi politician also recounted another horrific incident as narrated to her by another Yazidi victim, who told her how ISIS took six of her sisters and raped her 10-year-old sister to death in front of her father and other sisters.
Sold, Wipped and raped: Yazidi woman keeps a secret notebook in which she recorded the abuses committed against her and other
In October 2020, AlJazeera reported about a Yazidi woman named Layla Talu, who while speaking to the media house, recounted how she was abducted, beaten up, starved, raped and subjected to brutal torture by Islamic terrorists in 2014. Layla spoke of how on the morning of August 3, 2014, Layla, her husband, Marwan Khalil, and their two children, who were aged four and 18 months were abducted by ISIS terrorists while they were trying to flee the Sinjar district in Iraq like many other Yazidis tried to do to save themselves from the ISIS atrocities. They were captured by the terrorists after her neighbours in Sinjar exposed her location in her town.
Layla then said, “the way they (ISIS) dealt with us was not different from how you deal with sheep and animals; they did not even provide us with adequate food and drink. We slept on the floor and received three daily meals and beatings by ISIL operatives”.
Layla was imprisoned for 40 days with her children before being transferred to other ISI senior members who abused and raped her. Recalling the atrocities inflicted upon her, Layla revealed how she was raped and sold multiple times to ISI terrorists. She maintained a notebook during her time in Raqqa, in which she recorded some of the horrifying details of the experiences she and other Yazidi women and girls endured.
ISIS bride reveals murder of a 5-year-old Yazidi girl
In 2019, an ISIS bride spilt the beans about the excesses meted out by her and her husband to a German security service official posing as a driver. The ISIS bride identified as Jennifer W, 27, is a German national who got converted to Islam in 2013. As per the formal charge against Jennifer, she and her husband bought a 5-year-old Yazidi girl as a slave in the summer of 2015.
According to the German authorities, the girl child was tied up by Jennifer’s husband and left to die of thirst. The defendant’s husband chained up the girl in the scorching heat and left her to die after she fell ill and wet her mattress. Jennifer allowed her husband to do what he wanted and displayed no intention of saving the girl.
ISIS burns 19 Yazidi women alive for refusing to have sex
In 2016, as many as nineteen Yazidi women were burnt alive by ISIS terrorists in the Iraqi city of Mosul after they refused to have sex with the extremists.
The ARA News agency reported then how these destitute women were put in iron cages and burnt to death as hundreds of people watched in horror. “They were punished for refusing to have sex with ISIS militants,” the news agency quoted Abdullah al-Malla, a local media activist, as saying.
10-year-old Yazidi girl becomes pregnant, feeds on sticks and animal dung to survive
In yet another horrific story to emerge from war-torn Syria, a Yazidi woman alleged that her niece, who was forced to become a sex slave for the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS), became pregnant at the age of ten. The lady, identified as Mahdya, alleged that children like her 10-year-old niece were thrashed with cables if they defied the ISIS orders. Further throwing light on the appalling conditions in which Yazidi women and children are held captive, Mahdya said that her niece was pushed to feed on sticks and animal dung to survive.
Meanwhile, speaking about the 10-year-old, Ziad Avdal, a former teacher who runs safe houses for Yazidis escaping ISIS, said, “It is not just terrible that she is pregnant. These young girls may have been raped by 100 men before they become pregnant.”
15-year-old sold 7 times
Last year, Twitter user Azzad Alsalem (@AzzatAlsaleem) posted a Twitter thread, chronicling the ordeal faced by the Yazidis at the hands of the Islamic State. In one of his Tweet, a woman, who was just 15 years old, recounted how she was sold 7 times after she was held captive by ISIS. The believers of ‘sex jihad’ did not feel any remorse before subjecting a child to a lifetime of trauma.
Yazidi child sold as a ‘gift’ during Eid
Another ISIS survivor, who was sold during Eid, recounted, “I was a child when I was kidnapped. I was sold 8 times, 3 of my owners raped me. I was given a gift during Islamic Eid. I was separated from my mother and tortured. My sister is as sold too.”
14-year-old Yazidi girl sold to a 50-year-old ISIS fighter; beaten mercilessly, fed only one meal a day for resisting rape
A 14-year-old Yazidi girl narrated her horrifying ordeal when she was taken captive and sold off to a 50-year-old ISIS fighter.
“The militants divided us by gender and age: One for young and capable men, another for girls and young women, and a third for older men and women. The jihadists stole cash and jewellery from this last group and left them alone at the oasis. Then they placed the girls and women in trucks. As they drove us away, we heard gunshots. Later we learned that they were killing the young men, including my 19-year-old brother, who had married just six months ago,” recalled the devastated Yazidi girl while speaking to a WaPo journalist.
She added how one day the guards separated the married from unmarried women. “My good childhood friend Shayma and I were given as a gift to two Islamic State members from the south, near Baghdad. They wanted to make us their wives or concubines. Shayma was awarded to Abu Hussein, who was a cleric. I was given to an overweight, dark-bearded man about 50 years old who seemed to have some high rank. He went by the nickname, Abu Ahmed.”
Abu Ahmed kept telling me to convert, which I ignored. He tried to rape me several times, but I did not allow him to touch me in any sexual way. Instead, he cursed me and beat me every day, punching and kicking me. He fed me only one meal per day,” the teenager recounted.
Raped and abused by ISIS, Yazidi teenager burns her face to “make herself undesirable”
Another implausible incident came to light wherein a 17-year-old Yazidi girl burnt her face on her own so that she no more becomes prey to ISIS’ barbarity. In 2016, Hindustan Times reported about this Yazidi teenage rape survivor, who was so petrified of the prospect of enduring rape and abuse at the hands of ISIS once again, that she doused herself in gasoline and lit a match. The flames burned her hair and face, peeling away her nose, lips and ears.
She was so physically deformed and psychologically wounded when a German physician by the name of Jan Ilhan Kizilhan discovered her in a refugee camp in northern Iraq in 2015 that she had mistakenly believed her old captors were after her. Such was her trauma that she burnt herself alive, hoping to render herself no longer desirable to the extremists.
In 2014, the United Nations reported that about 5000 Yazidis were murdered while 5000-7000 women and children were captured. In its digital magazine Dabiq, ISIS justified, “One should remember that enslaving the families of the (non-believers) and taking their women as concubines is a firmly established aspect of the Shariah, that if one were to deny or mock, he would be denying or mocking the verses of the Quran and the narrations of the Prophet.”
