Long road to justice for Yazidis who escaped IS
Yazidi women who were once held captive by the Islamic State still struggle to have their voices heard in Iraqi courtrooms, where their captors are being tried.
DAHUK, Kurdistan Region of Iraq — When Hayat was captured from Sinjar by the Islamic State in August 2014, the militants thought that the petite Yazidi woman with a girly face was much younger than 19. To ensure that IS wouldn’t sell her as a slave, Hayat pretended to be deaf and mute. She assumed IS fighters weren’t interested in handicapped girls.
She turned out to be right. The first couple of months, Hayat wasn’t separated from her family or sold as a "sabiyya," or sex slave. But then somebody blew her cover. That’s when her nightmare really began.
"A fellow captive, a Yazidi woman, told IS that I lied, that I could indeed hear and speak," says Hayat, now 23. "Together, with other women and girls, IS took me to a base in Mosul. An IS leader named Abu Ali gave me clothes and forced me to take a shower. After this, an IS fighter drew my name out of a lottery.”
Sitting in a badly ventilated tent in an overcrowded camp for internally displaced persons near the city of Dahuk, she tells Al-Monitor she would like to share her story but doesn’t want her real name mentioned as some members of her family are still in captivity.
