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Overview
The headlines have moved on, but thousands of Yezidi women and children remain in captivity. Sinjar is now free from ISIS but the Yezidi homeland is at the center of growing tensions, making a return home for those who fled almost impossible.
The mass abduction of Yezidi women and children is here conveyed with extraordinary intensity in the first-hand reporting of a young journalist who has been based in Iraqi Kurdistan for the past four years, covering the war with ISIS.
The Yezidi women who were caught up in this disaster often followed the tradition of their ancestors who, a century ago during persecutions at the fall of the Ottoman Empire, put ash on their faces to make themselves unattractive in order to try to avoid rape.
Today, over 3,000 Yezidi women and girls remain in the Caliphate where they are bought and sold, and passed between fighters as chattel. But many other have escaped or been released. Otten bases her book on interviews with these survivors, as well as those who smuggled them to safety, painstakingly piecing together their accounts of enslavement. Their deeply moving personal narratives bring alive a human tragedy.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781944869458 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | OR Books |
| Publication date: | 10/24/2017 |
| Pages: | 256 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.00(w) x 7.50(h) x 0.80(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
A car carrying “Leila” drew close to her family’s home in a camp for displaced Yezidis in northern Iraq. Her female relatives, dressed in black and brown shawls, sat around the sides of the room chatting in quiet voices. Next to the door was a small kitchen unit and, beneath it, a pile of black sandals to be slipped on before the women went outside onto the muddy roads of the camp.
It was mid-afternoon on an early spring day, just after a rainstorm, and outside the air was fresh and mountain-bruised. I asked the women where they were from. “Kojo,” one of them gave me.
A few moments later everyone turned toward the door. They had heard car wheels crunching on the gravel outside. Leila entered the room and collapsed into an older woman’s arms. They began to cry. A small girl with pigtails ran in behind her, looking bewildered.
Leila wore a cream headscarf, a long black skirt, and a denim coat that was too big for her. Her face was red and scrunched up with tears washing her cheeks. The women wailed as she was carried into the room clutching her grandmother’s breast. Everyone was crying now and the grandmother began to sing.
The relief that Leila and the small girl had returned was tangible. But in the grandmother’s mournful song there was also a lament for the women still held captive, and deep grief for the men from their village who had been murdered in their village.
**
Leila sank into a corner of the room surrounded by a dozen members of her extended family who were gathering to receive her, women with olive skin and tired eyes. Each woman bent down to touch Leila and kiss her cheeks, welcoming her back. Her grandmother continued to sing.
Leila had been kidnapped a year and a half previously, taken from Kojo, a village below Sinjar Mountain. Her captors took her across two countries and then kept her locked in a house more than three hundred miles away, before she was able to escape.
She had been enslaved by ISIS, the militant jihadi group that captured large parts of Syria and Iraq in 2014 and embarked on a policy of exterminating the Yezidi religion, killing its men and taking its women into slavery because of the tenets of their interpretation of Islam. The genocide is still ongoing and has only partially been revealed.
An estimated six thousand three hundred and eighty three Yezidis—mostly women and children—were enslaved and transported to ISIS prisons, military training camps, and the homes of fighters across eastern Syria and western Iraq, where they were raped, beaten, sold, and locked away. By mid 2016, two thousand five hundred and ninety women and children had escaped or been smuggled out of the Caliphate and three thousand seven hundred and ninety three remained in captivity . Around three thousand Yezidis were killed, half executed in the days following the ISIS attack, with the rest left dying on Sinjar Mountain from injuries, starvation, or dehydration.
Some, like Leila, escaped by outsmarting the men, using methods of resistance passed down from earlier generations of Yezidi women who had endured religious persecution. Today over three thousand Yezidi women and children remain in captivity, where they’ve been since they were kidnapped in 2014, with few attempts to rescue them.
Leila’s jailer, Shakir Abdul Wahab Ahmed Zaater, was an ISIS military commander in Rutbah, Anbar province, who became notorious after being filmed executing Syrian truck drivers in 2013.