Yazidi schoolgirl recounts how she was raped daily for six months by ISIS 'beast'

Jardine Malado Thursday, July 27, 2017

A refugee woman from the minority Yazidi sect, who fled the violence in the Iraqi town of Sinjar, sits with a child inside a tent at Nowruz refugee camp in Qamishli, northeastern Syria, August 17, 2014. | Reuters/Rodi Said

A Yazidi girl has recently recounted the horror of being kidnapped by Islamic State fighters at the age of 14 and how she was raped daily for six months by one of the militants she described as a "beast."

The girl, identified only as Ekhlas, was among the thousands of Yazidi women and children who were kidnapped by ISIS when it took over parts of Iraq in a brutal campaign in August 2014.

Ekhlas and her family tried to flee to Mount Sinjar where about 50,000 Yazidis have sought refuge, but they could not run fast enough. She witnessed her father being killed before she was taken from her mother and locked in a prison.

"All I heard was screaming and crying, everyone was starving, they weren't feeding anyone," she said in an interview with BBC's Victoria Derbyshire show.

"I saw a man who was over 40 take a 10-year-old girl. The girl was screaming. I'll never forget those screams, screaming for mum, 'mama, mama' but we could do nothing," she added.

Ekhlas, now 16, revealed that she felt so hopeless that she tried to kill herself in captivity. She recalled that her abuser picked her out of 150 girls by drawing lots.

"He was so ugly, like a beast, with his long hair. He smelt so bad, I was so frightened I couldn't look at him," she narrated.

"Every day for six months he raped me. I tried to kill myself. How am I telling you this without crying? I tell you I ran out of tears," she went on to say.

Ekhlas managed to escape while her captor was out fighting and made it to safety at a refugee camp. She is now living in Germany where she is receiving therapy and education in a psychiatric hospital.

According to Independent, ISIS has killed or captured an estimated 9,900 Yazidis when the terror group took over Mount Sinjar in 2014. As many as 3,100 of that figure were murdered, with almost half executed by gunshot, beheading or being burned alive. Others died from starvation, dehydration or injuries during the ISIS invasion.

Around 6,800 more Yazidis were kidnapped during the siege, with over a third still missing, at the time of the survey, published in the weekly journal PLOS Medicine.

A report published by The Guardian noted that to date, there have been no known large-scale rescue missions to free the Yazidi captives in Iraq and Syria, by either the U.S., Iraqi or Kurdistan regional governments.