She said the name of a village at the foot of Mount Sinjar. “They captured us as we were trying to flee to the mountains,” she said. “We thought Kocho had been spared.”
“No. It looked like it might be to begin with. We were given a guarantee of our safety. But two days ago the Arabs attacked us.”
“We were abducted a week ago.”
“What’s going on here?”
“This is a prison,” the girl said, faltering. I had a keen sense that she hadn’t told us everything. “But it’s not a permanent prison. They keep coming to take girls away.”
“Who takes them away? And where?”
“The ISIS men. They come every day.”
“They’re selling us,” another girl said, uttering those words that the first one hadn’t been able to.
I felt giddy. When they heard this the girls who had arrived with me started crying again. In their desperation some tried to run to the door. So the ISIS man’s announcement in Mosul that he’d be selling us hadn’t been an empty threat. The slave market he’d talked about was here in this very hall.
Evin was worried about me having another attack. She helped me sit on the floor and fanned air in my face. “How could they do this to us? Who gives them the right?”
“These aren’t people, they’re monsters,” she said. “But they’ll get their comeuppance one day.”
Evin put her arm around me, stroked my hair, and whispered words of comfort. She calmed me as a mother does a child in distress. At that moment I realized that she was the only person I still had. Except for Evin, nothing of my old life remained. I sensed that I’d die if she were taken from me too. “Promise you’ll stay with me,” I said to her.
Evin gave me her word. “I’ll look after you,” she said.
OUR NEW PRISON was essentially the hall we spent most of our time in. Besides this were a back room with empty shelves, a sitting room cum office with carpets and sofas, a rather dilapidated bathroom with a washbasin and toilet, and a small inner courtyard, surrounded by high walls and barbed wire. The only window was in the sitting room, and it was secured with metal bars. Through it you could see the Euphrates flowing past. We reckoned that the building had previously been used as a warehouse. Perhaps industrial goods had been stored, bought, and shipped here. Perhaps ISIS had driven out the owner. Or he’d already left the place to flee the civil war. We didn’t know. All we did know was that now we were the goods the men were selling. It soon became clear that this building on the edge of Raqqa was the main warehouse and market for kidnapped Yazidi girls.
The morning after our arrival our guards brought us cheese sandwiches and water. We were too starving, too dehydrated, and too weak to reject food again. Greedily we quenched our thirst and devoured the sandwiches. For such is the human body: in the end it wants to survive and so forgets its pride.
Then the first customers arrived. From a distance we could hear the engines of cars approaching and parking by the earthwork. The girls who’d been prisoners for longer immediately wrapped their scarves around their faces. Evin and I followed their example. By the entrance outside we could hear our captors greeting the other men. They took off the chains, unlocked the door, and let them in: a large group of ISIS fighters in dark garb. Many of them had long hair and beards, some wore turbans. All of them were carrying heavy weapons and were quite clearly in a good mood. “So we have a nice lot of new arrivals, do we?” one of them asked.
“Forty-seven young Yazidis arrived only last night,” the highest-ranking of our guards confirmed in his Palestinian accent.
The customer looked around with keen interest. “And which ones are those?”
“All you new ones, stand together in a group!” our guard ordered.
We ignored his command. A few girls turned to face the wall. Others tried to escape into the rooms at the back. It was a hopeless act of resistance, as the men with their rifles barely allowed us to move a centimeter.
“Enough shenanigans,” the Palestinian said, calling us to order. “You’re now going to line up like good girls. Hurry up!”
His helpers dragged us to the middle of the room and tore the scarves from our faces. We resisted and screamed. But they beat us with such brutality that we shut up. Terrified, we stayed where the men had put us. “Lift up your beautiful little heads,” the Palestinian ordered, running his finger under the chin of one of my friends to make her raise it even further. “And now show me your hands,” he demanded. Trembling, she stretched out her arms toward him and turned her palms upward, as if she were about to pray. The sight of her made me particularly sad.
“Yes, very good,” he praised her. “Now the rest of you—stand like this too! After all, we want to get a good look at you, don’t we?”
None of us offered any further resistance. The men walked along the rows, giving the girls a thorough inspection, one after another. They chatted in a variety of dialects; I detected the familiar Arabic of Iraq and Syria, but also the Egyptian and Tunisian vernaculars I’d only heard on television before. I thought I could identify another man, who had a long, especially thin beard, as a Saudi by the way he spoke. They were an international bunch. But I understood them all. “They’re hot, these Yazidi girls,” I heard one say close to me.
“Are all of these girls really still virgins?” another asked.
“They’re unmarried. Nobody has touched them,” our Palestinian guard assured the men. “As I said: fresh goods.”
The interested parties nodded their satisfaction. “We’d have to try them out to be sure,” one said. This same man, a rather portly individual with chubby cheeks and a sparse beard, suddenly stopped beside me and gave a stare. I felt ashamed and tried to hide my face behind my long hair. But he stroked it away with his sausagelike fingers and kept ogling me. His gaze was brazen and lecherous.
“Hey, you,” he said. “I particularly like the look of you. How old are you?”
I didn’t reply.
“Come on, tell me. You do understand me, don’t you?”
I stood there as stiff as a statue, saying nothing.
“Does she understand Arabic?” he asked, turning to the men who guarded us. But they were clueless.
“They talk Kurdish to each other, but some can speak Arabic too,” they replied vaguely. The man nodded. I watched him stretch his arm out toward me again. His fingers touched my lips. When he tried to push my jaws apart my heart started thumping like mad. It seemed as if he wanted to check the quality of my teeth. I was reminded of the livestock market in Kocho; this is how the men would check donkeys and cows before buying them. “Quite meticulous, aren’t you?” his friends quipped.
Instinctively, and out of the blue, I bit him as hard as I could. The man yelped and pulled his hand away. The sausage finger was bleeding. “You bitch!” he cried. “You bit me!” His mates made fun of him, and he became absolutely livid.
“You won’t do that a second time, my girl!” he yelled, violently ramming the butt of his rifle into my stomach. I bent over with pain. He kept thrashing me, then I fainted. The last thing I recalled was that familiar feeling of giddiness.
“Watch out! She’s falling,” I heard one of the men say. But it was too late; I began to jerk and my face twisted into grimaces. I’d lost control over my own body in another of my epilepsy attacks. Before the eyes of everyone else my body performed contortions I wasn’t aware of myself. For me the world outside had ceased to exist. My consciousness had turned inward. “She’s ill,” Evin’s voice came to me from the distance. “Can’t you see she’s ill?”
When I came around I was lying on one of the sofas in the sitting room. A girl was fanning my face. And Evin was still talking to the man who had beaten me. “Farida is ill,” she reiterated. “She needs medical attention. If you take her you have to be aware of this.”
But the man had seen enough for the time being and lost interest in me. The group took fifteen girls from Kocho altogether; Evin and I were not among them. But we could h
ear the screams of our friends as they bound their hands and took the girls outside to load them into their cars.
THERE WAS NO closing time at the slave market in Raqqa. The sales display was open around the clock. Men came into the hall at any time of day or night to inspect the wares.
Some were seeking a slave for themselves. If they’d come to Syria from abroad their wives were often too far away to look after them. Which meant they wanted a replacement for the duration of their time away. The Syrians, on the other hand, often already had a wife with them, but were looking for one or two more to help out at home. Then it was particularly important that the girls in question spoke Arabic, because they would have to understand instructions and be able to communicate.
Other men were sent by their bosses, who wanted some fun but didn’t have any time to do the shopping themselves. Or they were after a “present” for someone they owed a favor. And slave girls were also in great demand as barter goods. In such cases the buyers were especially after young and dainty girls who would please the other man and not cause any trouble. After all, they didn’t want to risk any “complaints.”
The men voiced their wishes and preferences candidly. In conversation they’d frequently reassure each other that they were justified in enslaving us because, as non-Muslims, we were not their equals as people. As pious Muslims they were the master race and we were subhumans. And in a group where everyone thought the same way, perhaps after a while they actually believed this to be true. We, however, made every effort to upset their view of the world. “What you’re doing is wrong,” we told them. “Your religion does not allow you to kidnap and sell women.”
“Only Muslim women enjoy our protection,” they’d reply. “Infidels like you have no rights at all.”
“But we’re married!” we claimed. “And in your faith it is a sin to use another man’s wife.”
“You’re lying,” our guards said. They hated it when we said such things because it had a bad effect on the price. “All the girls here are unmarried.”
“What does it matter?” one of the ISIS men said. “If their husbands are dead we have the right to take them for ourselves.”
The others expressed their agreement. Some even spoke of a fatwa supposedly permitting such behavior. In reality, however, they must all have been aware they were committing a crime, because neither Islam nor any other religion in the world endorsed the trade of abducted women.
Only once did we see the mask slip from one of the men. He was a Syrian and came with his friend or colleague from a local ISIS unit in Raqqa. As usual we had to line up before them and stand upright, so they could see and examine us from all sides. The man’s friend picked out a girl, then retired to the sitting room with our captors to negotiate a price, while we remained in the hall with the other man. We were still standing there rigidly, waiting for him to decide too. But he just stared at us sadly, making no move to come closer.
“You poor creatures,” we heard him say all of a sudden, when he was sure that no one apart from us could hear him. “If it were up to me I’d let all of you go. I’m really sorry that you have to put up with all this.”
We thought at first that we’d misunderstood him. Evin, who was standing beside me, was the first to grasp what he’d actually said. Falling on her knees before him, she begged, “Please, good man, take us with you. Me and my sister. She’s ill. She needs help.”
I kneeled before him too. “Please save us!” I implored him. “We’ll serve in your house.”
But the man shook his head. “I can’t,” he said, embarrassed. “I can’t take you with me. My family would never accept it. They’d pour scorn on me if I brought two Yazidi girls home.”
“Then take Farida with you at least! Take her as a servant girl,” Evin begged. “She’s a good cook and will be of great help to your wife.” But he merely shook his head sadly.
When his friend came back the man didn’t say any more. Of course, it would have been dangerous to express his opinion in front of the others. We understood that. And yet we were deeply disappointed when he left the hall without taking any of us with him. Thus vanished our potential savior. He was the only one of the men who I saw with anything approaching a conscience. But he still wasn’t going to risk anything for us Yazidi girls.
OUR GROUP SHRANK. Every day new men arrived to buy girls and take them away, but there were no new arrivals. I can’t remember how many times we had to line up and let them ogle us. For us, time became blurred. As we had nothing to change into, we still wore the clothes we’d had on when our village was attacked. I spent the whole time there in my black blouse and brown skirt. Evin was dressed entirely in black. We barely washed either, even though, as I said, there was a basin. Why should we bother? We didn’t want to smell or look nice, but rather wanted to appear as unattractive as possible.
Of all our captors, we hated the Egyptian and Palestinian the most. They kept coming out with obscene comments. The Syrians were slightly better mannered, which may have been due to the fact that they weren’t hardened ISIS fighters, but only nominal members. They’d joined the group opportunistically when ISIS conquered northern Syria. But they too didn’t hesitate to abuse their new power over us. The opportunity to acquire us as “slaves” was an enticing option to them.
Whenever we noticed that a man was interested in us we would try to put him off. The moment someone touched me I would immediately start screaming and hitting myself. They needed to know right away that I would not fulfill their desires. Evin, who always stood beside me, but was in less demand because of her age, warned them that I was ill. This was no mere ploy; because I couldn’t take my medicine, I did have a number of bad attacks during this period. And each time I’d be badly beaten for it. But over time my captors too came to realize that I couldn’t do anything about it and that I urgently needed medical assistance. “Tell the men that Farida’s your sister,” one of them advised Evin. “Maybe then you’ll both get taken together.”
We didn’t want to become the “possession” of any of these criminals, either together or separated. But the fewer girls there were, the more dangerous our situation became. At the presentations the choice became ever smaller. We knew that we wouldn’t be able to put off our sale for much longer. So I said to Evin, “We’ve got to get out of here. We must find a way to escape.”
With the other girls that remained we debated whether we could overpower the guards at the door. They already suspected that we were hatching something and they tried to scare us. “If any one of you tries to escape we’ll shoot you on the spot,” they warned us.
“But we’ve got to try,” I whispered. “The next time they open the door for customers we’ll rush them and grab their weapons.”
Evin and the others gave me a look of horror. “How’s that going to work? Only two of us can get through the door at a time,” they objected. “That’s not enough to deal with those guys out there.”
They’re right, my math brain told me. As soon as the first girls were out they’d be nabbed by the men before anyone else had left the hall, and the door would be shut again. It couldn’t work. Feverishly I thought about what else we could do. Wasn’t there another way out? We searched the entire building for an alternative escape route. But the only window was secured with those strong bars and the walls in the courtyard were too high to scale. Nothing. Then chance came to our aid. Evin came rushing into the hall from the back room, looking unusually happy. “I’ve found something!” she announced.
“What?” we asked, full of curiosity.
“This!” Triumphantly she held out a pair of pliers.
“That’s unbelievable! Where did you get them?”
“They were in a cardboard box behind one of the bookshelves.” Someone must have left them there and forgotten about them.
Now our situation looked quite different. With pliers we could try to break the locks on the door when our guards were sleeping at night. But what if one of them woke up? Then they’d
give us short shrift. It was an undertaking fraught with danger. I deliberated again and came up with a better idea: we’d use the pliers to get rid of the bars by the window on the other side of the building. Then we could all escape together at night across the Euphrates.
It was a brilliant plan. The very thought that it might work lifted our spirits. As soon as we sensed we weren’t being watched Evin and I got down to work on the bars with the pliers. To begin with we tried to cut through them. But they were too thick. So we resorted to bending them to the side, to create a space we could squeeze through. But that too was harder than we’d thought. The metal turned out to be incredibly unpliable and robust. Evin cast me a look of dismay. Would our physical strength ultimately prove insufficient to overcome the material?
“Come on, keep going,” I encouraged her. “We can’t give up. We simply have to do it.”
We took turns. Meanwhile the other girls kept an eye on the door to the hall so they could warn us in time if our guards approached. We had bent the bars quite a way when the alarm was suddenly raised. A girl came running to us. “Stop right now!” she said. “They’re coming!”
We hurriedly hid the pliers beneath my skirt and went over to the others. The chains were rattling and the metal door was being slid open. Our captors led two men into the hall. I will never forget the sight of them.
One was an ISIS fighter from Libya. Tall and thin, he looked mean. He had a long beard and long, bedraggled hair, as was the ISIS fashion. I heard him referred to as Abu Haitham. From the outset he repulsed me. The second man, a rather pale and chubby guy, was called Eleas. He was an Iraqi from Mosul and looked nothing like your classic ISIS soldier, as he was clean-shaven with short hair. In spite of this, the two men acted like friends or colleagues, although the Libyan called all the shots.
They stalked along the rows, which had thinned out considerably; only about forty of us were left now. The men stopped in front of a few girls. Abu Haitham touched their faces and legs, to “check the quality,” as he put it. He took a particular shine to two of our new friends, Amna and Lena, two skinny teenagers with fearful eyes and long brown hair. Lena had remarkably white skin, which is considered very beautiful in our region. I became nervous. If we were going to venture an escape tonight we wanted to take them with us. These men must not whisk them away beforehand.
The Girl Who Escaped ISIS Page 8