Yazidi slave women emerging from Baghouz recount rape, torture

Salwa Sayed Al-Omar spent years as a Yazidi prisoner of Daesh, but she escaped its clutches this week, fleeing its last populated enclave in east Syria along with two Iraqi boys pretending to be her brothers.

“They took women, abused them and killed them,” said Omar, describing how terrorists bought and sold their Yazidi captives or passed them around as sex slaves.

“A woman was shifted from one man to another unless it was to one who had a bit of mercy... if she was in good condition, she would carry on. If not, she would get married to avoid being abused,” she said.

Omar was eventually married to a Tajik terrorist. As the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) besieged the enclave at Baghouz, some surviving Yazidi women and children emerged. 

Omar escaped along with two Iraqi children, Mustafa and Dia, who had been her neighbors for two years.

“They were hiding us in different places so we couldn’t be seen or helped,” Omar said.  After a month of siege in Baghouz, they were reduced to eating grass and hiding in holes. They all managed to get away from her “husband” by paying him money. 

Rescued women Hammo and Farha Farman, said some are refusing to leave their children behind with their Daesh fathers, while others are staying out of conviction, having adopted the jihadi ideology. Many are simply too terrified to flee.

Hammo said she was sold 17 times. One of her owners, a Swede, would lock her in the home for days without food while he went to fight. Another man, an Albanian, stomped on her hands in his military boots, after she scolded him for buying a nine-year-old slave girl.

In Raqqa, her nephews, 12 and 13 years old, carried guns and served as guards to a German fighter. When she invited them to eat with her, they refused, saying she was an infidel. She snapped back at them, “You’re one of us. You’re infidels, too.”

Hammo said she had urged a Yazidi woman married to an Uzbek Daesh fighter to leave Baghouz with her, but the woman, who has had two children with the man, refused. “She said she’d blow herself up first,” said Hammo.