A 15-year-old girl has revealed how she escaped Isis militants by drugging and shooting two husbands who bought her as a slave.The teenager, who choose to remain anonymous to protect her family, was one of hundreds of women from the Yazidi sect who were kidnapped in Mount Sinjar.
The women and girls were trafficked to Isis strongholds, where survivors say many were raped. The captives were said to include girls as young as five and are still holding her two sisters.Her father, other brothers and other male relatives have vanished, their fates unknown.She spoke with Associated Press after telling her relatives to leave the room..
'They took girls to Syria to sell them,'I was sold in Syria. I stayed about five days with my two sisters, then one of my sisters was sold and taken (back) to Mosul, and I remained in Syria.'
In Raqqa, she said, she was first married off to a Palestinian man. She claims she shot him, saying the Palestinian's Iraqi housekeeper who was in a dispute with the man helped her by giving her a gun. She fled, but she had nowhere to run. So she went to the only place she knew, she said - the house where she was first held with the other girls in Raqqa.
There, the militants did not recognize her and sold her off again - for $1,000 to a Saudi fighter, she said. The Saudi militant took her to a house where he lived with other fighters.
"He told me, 'I'm going to change your name to Abeer, so your mother doesn't recognize you,'" she said. "'You'll become Muslim, then I will marry you.' But I refused to become a Muslim and that's why I fled."
She said she saw the fighters at time taking a powdered drug. So she poured it into tea she served to the Saudi and the other men, causing them to fall asleep. Then she fled the house.
She found a man who would drive her to Turkey to meet her brother. Her brother then borrowed $2,000 from friends to pay a smuggler to get them both back to Iraq. They ended up in Maqluba, a tiny roadside hamlet just outside the Kurdish city of Dahuk, where several other Yazidi families are staying.
The other women who spoke to The AP described difficult conditions, where the militant fighters would deprive them of enough food, water or even a place to sit. They all reported having seen dozens of other Yazidi women and children as young as 5 years old in captivity, and they all said that they have relatives who are still missing.
Amsha Ali, a 19-year-old, said she was taken from Sinjar to Mosul. Ali was around six months pregnant at the time. The last she saw of her husband and other men in her family as she was being dragged off, was the scene of the militants forcing them to lie on the ground, apparently to shoot them. Ali agreed to be identified, saying she wanted the ordeals of the women to be known.
In Mosul, she said, she and other women were taken to a house full of ISIS fighters to be married off. "Each of them took one of us for themselves," she said. She too was given to a fighter. She said she was never raped by the man - likely because of her pregnancy, she said - but she witnessed other girls being raped.
After several weeks, she was able to slip out of a bathroom window at night and escape. A Mosul resident who found her in the streets helped her get out of the city to nearby Kurdish territory on Aug. 28, she said. She said she tried to convince other women to flee with her, but they were too afraid. "Because they were so terrified, they are left there and now I know nothing about them," .
Now Ali is with her father and a surviving sister living in an unfinished building in the town of Sharia, where some 5,000 Yazidi refugees live, also near Dahuk.
"The killing was not the hardest thing for me," "Even though they forced my husband, brother-in-law and father-in-law on the ground to be murdered - it was painful - but marrying (the militant) was the worst. It was hardest thing for me."
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