ISIS killed and enslaved vast numbers of Yazidi people, a religious minority. Their brutal death at ISIS hands came to be known as the Sinjar Massacre. Thousands fled, whereas in the villages the older women were killed while thousands of younger women were raped and sold into slavery.
Iraqi-born Kurdish photojournalist Seivan Salim met these women in a refugee camp. They had escaped but were haunted by their stories. All she could do to bring justice to light was snap photos of these women.
Her photos and the women’s stories are presented in a project known as “Escaped” that is part of a larger online storytelling project built by the Metrography photo agency and writers all around the world, titled Map of Displacement.
Syhan, 30
From: Kojo, Sinjar area
Date of Capture: 08/15/2014
Length of captivity: Ten months
Syhan fell pregnant during her captivity and escaped when she was in her eighth month. She stayed in Turkey for two months until the baby was born. She came back to northern Iraq but wasn’t able to bring the baby with her from Turkey. She doesn’t know where he is.
Jihan, 20From: Sinon, Sinjar area
Date of capture: 08/04/2014
Length of captivity: Ten months“They put me and 14 other girls on a truck, and they took us to Mosul. We were all young and pretty. We didn’t stay in Mosul long; they took us to a small village where we stayed for 15 days. The conditions there were terrible. They put us in a filthy room, and we all got sick. Then we were taken to Raqqa in Syria. They told us that we would be sold, some as slaves, some as brides for the fighters. It was hot, unbearably hot, and there were 150 of us in a house without windows, without air. One afternoon about 20 men entered the house and started beating us. They shouted that we were their slaves, and we should obey them and do whatever we were told to do. They told us that they would punish us but never kill us because they preferred to torture us.”
Delvin, 27Delvin, 27From: Kojo, Sinjar area
Date of capture: 08/15/2014
Length of captivity: Four months“They separated the women from the others and brought us to a school, where we stayed for two months. Then they moved us to several different places. I don’t know exactly where. At last we arrived to Raqqa, in Syria. After 12 days they sent me to a Syrian family.
“I was pregnant and I had other children with me. They were very cruel to us. Even though I was pregnant they would beat me and try to have sex with me. If I didn’t accept to have sex with the men of the family, they would force me anyway. They raped me over and over again. I was sold again, this time to a family from Saudi Arabia. They took one of the boys who was with me to be trained as a jihadi. I never saw him again. I stayed there for a month and a half. I moved again to another city, where my baby was born. I was raped there too, despite the fact that I just had given birth.”
Muna, 18From: Kojo, Sinjar area
Date of capture: 08/15/2014
Length of captivity: Four months“ISIS forced me to go with them when I was in Tal Afar. They said, ‘If you don’t come with us we will behead your two young brothers.’ So I went with a man to Mosul. I worked for his family as a slave. They forced me to convert to Islam. Even though he had a wife and a family, he raped me continuously. ISIS still has five members of my family, and I don’t know where they are or if they’re still alive.”
Dlo, 20From: Kojo, Sinjar area
Date of captivity: 08/15/2014
Length of captivity: Eight months“It was 11 in the morning when ISIS came to our village; we were making lunch. They came into our house, grabbed us, and brought us to the school. They separated the men, women, and girls. We didn’t know what was going to happen to the men. We didn’t know that they would kill them all.“We were taken to Tal Afar along with other girls. ISIS militants would come to the house to select girls for their pleasure and take them away with them.”
Qaliya, 21From: Talqasab, Sinjar area
Date of Capture: 08/03/2014
Length of captivity: Ten months“When I was in Mosul I tried to flee by running to Sinjar mountain. I found a small empty house, where I sat and waited, but they came looking for me and they found me. A man asked, ‘Why did you flee? Are you afraid that we will kill you?’ I replied that I preferred to die. They took me back to my captor’s house, where he pushed me inside a room, closed the door and started to whip me. After that he hit me with a cable and then fastened my legs and hung me by the legs to the fan on the ceiling and then started to hit me again. He took me down and told me that my punishment would continue for three days and I would have nothing to eat nor drink. He also told me that if I ran away again he would tie me to two cars and then split me in two. Three days later he let me out of the room.”
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