The three girls’ eyes wept dry exhausted tears as they shared their stories in a humble, broken manner after they had experienced all of the atrocities of rape, sexual slavery and forced marriage.
Cousins, the eldest of the three, who is 19, unveils the ordeal. “When ISIS came into Sinjar Province and came into our city, they went house to house killing most of the men, young and old. They took the young girls and women between the ages of 14 and 30 - they took the pretty girls. We were taken along with many other girls.”
I sat with these three young teen-agers, listening to their harrowing story of being kidnapped by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria sexually assaulted, raped by a different man each night, over a period of four months. These young teens — ages 16, 17 and 19 — have witnessed the brutality and insanity of ISIS. With my Yazidi colleague, we visited with them inside a cold, abandoned building that they now called “home.” The United Nations refugee camps were filled and they could not return to their families — because their families were all dead. Dead. They were murdered, shot by Islamic terrorists. Entire families. With nowhere to go, these cousins were welcomed into this cold, bleak, cavernous concrete building. We brought in heaters and blankets, and money in order to assist them to start a new life.
“We were held for four months by ISIS,” the eldest cousin recalled. “We were sold multiple times to multiple men. Different men every night would rape us. We were commanded to wear the full Islamic burqa even though we are Yazidis.”
The Yazidis are an ancient ethnic group, the original inhabitants of Iraq for 6,000 years. They are pre-Jewish, pre-Christian and pre-Islamic monotheistic worshipers. Brutally persecuted over hundreds of years by Muslims who believe that the Yazidis are “infidels,” this ethnic group was overrun by ISIS in August 2014, when the terrorists came to Iraq’s Sinjar Province and many Yazidis fled to Sinjar Mountain.
“Three of us were often separated from each other,” the eldest cousin continued. “Right before our escape, we were placed together in the same house, watched 24 hours a day by ISIS men. The night of our escape, the man holding us captive fell asleep. We went into the bathroom, broke out a window and the three of us crawled out of the window around midnight.
“Because it was late at night and because we were walking unaccompanied, we were immediately stopped by a man who asked us why we were walking alone, without a male relative. As we were being questioned, a car pulled up and the driver inside said, ’These girls are my relatives,’ and we proceeded to get into the car. This stranger saved our lives. We did not know him, but out of his kind heart, he saw that we were in trouble and he took us to his home. We told him our story and he began to work with us to get us to safety. Over the next week, we traveled to a safe city after a distant relative paid thousands of dollars to free the three of us. We are now in this abandoned building with nowhere to go — and no family to go to because they are all dead.”
The five of us sat together for many hours, listening to their story and weeping with them. They teen-age girls asked me why I had come to Northern Iraq. I said: “I have three daughters not much older than you. … If my daughters had all this done to them, I would want someone to come and help them.”
“I am here to help you in the name of Jesus,” I told them.
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