freediver
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How I escaped from Islamic State's sexual slavery
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-03-07/how-i-escaped-the-islamic-state-terrorists/9406286
In a small village of Kojo in northern Iraq, Farida was living a "simple" life, harbouring dreams about the one thing many Western teens see as interfering with their daily life — school.
"We didn't have that big of dreams. My big dream was to continue school to become a maths teacher," she told the ABC.
Later, that very school would forever be stamped in the villagers' memories as a place where their families were murdered.
Born into a family of four brothers and a father who worked for the Iraqi Army, Farida developed a quality she later associated with saving her life.
"The reason that I tried to keep strong was, my father inspired me and said, 'you are strong and I'm sure you will be strong, doesn't matter when and how'," she said.
She now thinks he might have foreseen what was looming — after all, the Yazidis had been persecuted many times before.
And sure enough, on August 3, 2014, Islamic State (IS) militants surrounded the villages near Mount Sinjar.
While hundreds of thousands of Yazidis fled into the mountains where many of them later perished, for the residents in Kojo it was desperately late — IS had already started blockading the nearby villages.
What began as a negotiating campaign to turn the Kurdish religious minority into Muslims ended in genocide.
Men, women and children were taken to the school where they were robbed of their valuables and executed.
She lost her father and all but one brother — she didn't know it then, but he had survived by pretending to be dead among the corpses.
Farida's mother was captured by the militants and the 17-year-old was taken to a slave market in Mosul.
Sold as a sex slave
IS militants grouped slaves into three categories: virgins who were sold as sex slaves and generated income for the caliphate; young women with small kids; and women with older kids and elderly women, who did manual labour.
Teenage Farida's body was sometimes sold, sometimes "gifted" to IS soldiers.
"I have been in many different places when I was in captivity, but most of them, they were the same," she said.
They were markets for Yazidi girls. They [IS soldiers] were selling Yazidi girls and giving them as gifts and raping them again and again. "I have seen all these things.
"They sold me without money also."
An indication of how far the IS stronghold's tentacles spread — among her buyers were militants from Libya in northern Africa.
Failed escapes lead to torture
During four months of captivity, Farida tried to escape twice from the "military prison-like" buildings. Each failed attempt resulted in torture, leading to seven suicide attempts.
"They were always beating me, and in Syria one day they beat me much more than on other days. Even now some of my friends — the ones who were in captivity with me — say, 'we will never forget how they were beating you'," she said.
All the while, Farida pretended not to speak Arabic.
"One of the reasons was, I didn't want to communicate with them to reveal information when they asked me questions — because of my family," she said.
"Also, I didn't want to read the Koran.
And when they were talking to each other, I pretended I didn't understand Arabic because I wanted to see what they were going to do and what they were going to plan. And then one day, a Muslim man from Farida's region told the soldiers Yazidis in her village did speak Arabic and she was "lying and cheating".
With her disguise fading and two other imprisoned girls recently killed, she panicked.
"When I was watching how they beat younger girls, aged eight and nine, and they were raping many other girls, beating them, that was giving me more strength to escape and be their voice," she said.
Finding a path to freedom
One day, Farida found a phone where a SIM card hadn't been removed and called her uncle.
"When I called my uncle and told him I'm Farida, he told me, 'no, Farida is not alive'. He just cancelled [the call]," she said.
"Then I called him again and told him, 'no, it's me, I'm alive,' until I led him to believe that I'm alive."
Emotively, she started plotting one more escape.
It was something utterly trivial, a negligent act, through which she regained her freedom.
They thought they had locked the door, but it was actually open," she said.
That night, at 1:00am she and five other girls ran out of the compound in Syria.
Anxious the militants were going to track them down, the girls walked all night and hid in the valley — until they saw a house.
"I told my friends, 'I'll go and see at the house if they can help us," she said.
"If the family in the house is also with IS, I will not come back. Don't come to the same house and follow me."
But one of the girls interjected: "You have helped me all the while, and I will not let you go alone."
The family in the house helped them flee, but her escape highlights the more sinister, financial motives of some who assisted the IS captives.
"They helped us, but we paid them later," she said.
Nowhere to call home
Farida, like many former IS sex slaves, found herself alone in a refugee camp in Iraq — freed but nothing to return to.
There, she met Professor Jan Kizilhan, the head of a German refugee program — the Special Quota Project — which has seen psychological treatment and visas granted to 1,100 former IS slaves.
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