A year old Yazidi woman who was kidnapped and repeatedly raped by a member of the Islamic State terror group confronted her tormentor on Iraqi television last Tuesday, sobbing and demanding an explanation for her suffering. Then she fainted. Ashwaq Haji Hamid was 14 years old when IS group fighters seized Mount Sinjar in Iraq, the Yazidi ancestral heartland in Iraq, and went on to slaughter thousands of Yazidi men and boys and abduct girls to be used as sex slaves.
But then they separated us from one another. There, in Syria, the IS terrorists separated all the girls above the age of nine from their relatives.
We were taken to Mosul. We were or women in Mosul. We stayed there for three days and the IS men would come and see us. They would give us to one another as gifts or sell us for cheap. Hamid was given the chance by authorities to confront the jailed Abu Humam and, in a confrontation broadcast across the country, she berated him as he stood in front of her in a yellow prison uniform, his head bowed and his hands bound in front of him. I was 14 years old when you raped me.
Look up. Do you have any feelings? Do you have any honor? I was 14 years old, as old as your daughter, your son, or your sister. I was once held by ISIS, by you, but now you will feel the meaning of torment, torture and loneliness. If you had any feelings, you would not have raped me when I was 14, the age of your son, the age of your daughter. The brutal assault launched by IS in August that year pushed around , Yazidis to flee to other parts of Iraq, including the Kurdish region, where they live in ramshackle displacement camps.
According to authorities, more than 6, Yazidis were abducted by IS and only half of them were able to flee or be rescued, while the fate of the others remains unknown. Another , fled abroad.
