Teenage girls who escaped the brutal clutches of ISIS terrorists have recounted a harrowing nightmare of beatings, torture, rape and degradation that included being forced to watch videos of men being beheaded. The girls, members of the persecuted Yazidi minority from northern Iraq, say they were captured and sold or given as gifts.
“We would try to make ourselves look ugly,” an escaped girl, 15, told the Global Post news service. “Some women would cry or scream or fight, but it made no difference. They were always taken anyway.”She said they were debased so badly that death, even by suicide, was more appealing than living under ISIS’s barbaric control.
“One girl hanged herself,” the teen said. “Another tried, but the ISIS guards stopped her and beat her very badly. No one else tried after that.”
One of the young victims said she became frail and sick because her guards gave them so little to eat.Their captors also made them watch videos of beheadings of Yazidi men.
“In some [videos] they put the heads into cooking pots,” the anguished victim recalled. “Sometimes they would stand on them. There were so many heads. And they would ask us, ‘Do you know this one?’ and laugh.”
Another teen, a 19-year-old mother, said her ordeal began when she tried to flee from her village in the Sinjar region of Iraq with her husband and infant. ISIS vehicles caught up with them and others who were running, and forced the men to lie face-down on the ground.The rebels executed boys as young as 14, she said. She watched as her husband was shot to death.
Clinging to her only child, the mother and other women were bundled into pickup trucks and taken to a holding facility. There, they were pressured to convert to Islam and given copies of the Quran.“There was a big hall with three floors and each floor had five or six rooms,” the 15-year-old said. “They told us if we didn’t convert to Islam, they would kill all the men in our families, so we said to ourselves, ‘It’s just words. In our hearts we are still Yazidi.’ So I did it to save my brother.”She and others managed to escape while their captors were away at prayers.
Those assaults on Yazidis and other minorities — and in particular, the ISIS threat against tens of thousands of Yazidis trapped in Iraq’s Sinjar mountains — led President Obama to authorize airstrikes against ISIS in Iraq.
The US has since expanded those strikes to Syria.
Bombers from Britain joined the airstrike campaign Tuesday, with two Royal Air Force jets launching “precision strikes” on targets in Iraq.
According to Britain’s defense minister, the jets took out a “heavy-weapon position” and an armed pickup truck.
Kurdish troops said the RAF strikes helped them retake an “important border crossing” at Rabia near the border with Syria, according to the BBC.
Britain joined the US and France as countries that have hit ISIS in Iraq with airstrikes. Belgium and Denmark said they will also provide planes.
Meanwhile, Turkey edged closer to joining the conflict, asking its parliament to authorize a deployment of troops to Syria and Iraq as it bolstered security along its border.Turkey, a NATO member, has been accused of aiding Islamist militants and has not yet joined the US-led coalition conducting airstrikes against ISIS.
Many of the foreign fighters who have joined ISIS in Syria have entered through Turkish territory.Turkey’s policy shift follows Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s recent visit to the United States for the UN General Assembly meeting.
“We will hold discussions with our relevant institutions this week,” he said at the time. “We will definitely be where we need to be. We cannot stay out of this.”
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