Yazidi girls as young as eight raped as Isil sex slaves, finds report.
Eyewitness testimony by Yazidi women and girls in Iraq provides details of one of the most systematic instances of sexual slavery in the 21st century
Yazidi women hold small fires to make a wish for the Yazidi new year, at the holy shrine of Lalish, 35 miles north of the militant-held Mosul, Iraq
By
Ruth Sherlock, Beirut
7:41PM BST 15 Apr 2015
Yazidi girls – some of them as young as eight – were raped by jihadists and then sent back to the “market” to be resold. Those that were not, watched helpless as the men dragged away their mothers and their sisters.
This is just some of the harrowing detail gathered in a Human Rights Watch investigation into the fate of thousands of Yazidi women and girls abducted by the
extremists of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil).
The interviews, which took place in northern
Iraq with 20 Yazidi women and girls who have managed to flee and with the aid workers and doctors trying to help them, provide the most vivid account yet of what has become of Yazidi females whose
minority sect was ethnically cleansed by Isil extremists last summer.
Escapees described how the hostages have become victims of a mass programme of sexual slavery, with girls as young as eight years old being traded between the jihadists or given as “gifts”.
Displaced people from the minority Yazidi sect, fleeing the violence in the Iraqi town of Sinjar
Twelve-year-old Jalila, whose name has been changed for her own protection, told of being separated from her mother and sister and taken to a house in an Isil-controlled part of
Syria that had become a “market” of Yazidi women.
“The men would come and select us,” she said. “When they came, they would tell us to stand up and then examine our bodies. They would tell us to show our hair and sometimes they beat the girls if they refused. They wore dishdashas [ankle length garments], and had long beards and hair.”
Jalila told of being repeatedly raped, and then passed or sold to seven Isil fighters before she managed to flee.
Dilara, 20, whose name has also been changed, said she was held in a wedding hall in Syria with 60 other Yazidi female captives: “From 9:30 in the morning, men would come to buy girls to rape them.They were like animals.
“Once they took the girls out, they would rape them and bring them back to exchange for new girls. The ages ranged from 8 to 30 years – only 20 girls remained in the end.”
The interviews collected by Human Rights Watch support the findings of a
United Nations investigation at the end of last year, which reported the jihadists giving the captured Yazidi women “price tags for the buyers to choose and negotiate the sale”.
The eyewitness testimony given by the women and girls points to one of the most large-scale instances of sexual slavery in the 21st century.
The jihadists attacked the northern Iraqi province of Sinjar last August, overrunning the towns of the Yazidi ethnic minority, whom the jihadists have labelled as “devil worshippers”.
After killing hundreds of the men, the jihadists rounded up the women in the villages, taking them hostage and sending groups to different towns and cities under their control in Iraq and in Syria.
As many as 3,000 people, mainly Yazidis, remain in Isil captivity according to the UN.
