Yazidi women and their struggle against ISIS

Yazidi Kurdish women chant slogans during a protest against the Islamic State group’s invasion on Sinjar city one year ago, in Dohuk, northern Iraq, Monday, Aug. 3, 2015. Thousands of Yazidi Kurdish women and girls have been sold into sexual slavery and forced to marry Islamic State militants, according to Human Rights organizations, Yazidi activists and observers. (AP Photo/Seivan M.Salim)

After their husbands and families were killed, Yazidi women started taking it upon themselves to defend themselves and their territories from ISIS forces. Whether they were fighting women or refugees in one of the camps or women who were tortured by ISIS and managed to escape them, they all have a story to tell.

The Yazidis, a small Iraqi minority who believe in a single god who created the Earth and left it in the care of a peacock angel, have been subjected to large-scale persecution by ISIS, which accuses them of devil worship.

The United Nations has accused ISIS of committing genocide against the Yazidis, while ISIS claims the Quran justifies taking non-Muslim women and girls captive, and permits their rape.

ISIS have been actively capturing Yazidi women and selling them, all of them falling in the hands of jihadists and when it comes to women who were kidnapped, tortured and raped by ISIS, subjected to “everything you could imagine for women among savages,” most of these women deny they were raped because of the culture of shame around sex, but these women are slowly coming out and reaching for help.

Yazidi Kurdish women hold posters during a protest against the Islamic State group’s invasion on Sinjar city one year ago, in Dohuk, northern Iraq, Monday, Aug. 3, 2015. Thousands of Yazidi Kurdish women and girls have been sold into sexual slavery and forced to marry Islamic State militants, according to Human Rights organizations, Yazidi activists and observers. (AP Photo/Seivan M.Salim)

As for women brigades in places like Iraq, it’s not that hard to imagine a full brigade of women fighting in Sinjar which was claimed by ISIS as they killed it’s men and took its women and children for themselves. Most of these women say, that death is better than being caught by ISIS.

One of the rescued women was a 35-year-old woman with six children — all of whom had been captured, bought and sold in ISIS’ slave markets. In her desperate call for help, she described what had happened to them: “They loaded two big trucks from the village and took them somewhere, I don’t know where. When they were loading people on to the truck, a woman started arguing with them, so they killed her.”

Despite her horrific ordeal, the kidnapped woman in this recording was one of the lucky ones — she got out, eventually, as she retells her story to the Guardian.

Another victim, a 20-year-old Yazidi woman, who says she was held as a sex slave by ISIS, told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour in an exclusive interview that her captor was a fighter who told her he was from the United States.

Bazi (as she was asked to be called) told Amanpour she was captured by ISIS when the extremist group overran the city of Sinjar in Iraq, in August 2014. She was taken to Raqqa, Syria, which ISIS claims for its capital. There, she was auctioned off as a slave along with 10 other girls.

The American, she said, sold off the nine other girls and kept her for himself. and she recounts the horrors she faced, “Before raping me, he would pray for like fifteen minutes or half an hour. And after that, even if it was 2 a.m., 3 a.m., after raping me, he would go take a shower and pray again.”. When she finally managed to escape helping another girl with, she had already suffered from several failed attempts and sacrificing herself to protect other girls from rape.

Despite the help other Iraqis are trying to offer to these women, it’s hard to save all of them, and while some individual efforts managed to save over a hundred of them, more are committing suicide inside the ISIS camp in fear of what’s going to happen to them next.