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 Aug. 17, 2014. Proclaiming a caliphate straddling parts of Iraq and Syria, Islamic State militants have swept across northern Iraq, pushing back Kurdish regional forces and driving tens of thousands of Christians and members of the Yazidi religious minority from their homes.
Young Yazidi women, who
were captured by ISIS terrorists in Iraq and were found to be already pregnant,
were forced to undergo unsafe abortions by the terror group's gynecologists
before being sold as sex slaves, according to three Yazidis who managed to
escape their evil captors.
Three young Yazidis, who now live in the refugee
camps of Dohuk in Iraq, told their tragic stories to CNN, even as hundreds of other abducted women and girls remain
in the clutches of the Islamic State terror group, also known as ISIS or ISIL.
"One of my friends
was pregnant. Her child was about three months in the womb. They took her into
another room. There were two doctors and they did the abortion," a 21-year-old
Yazidi woman was quoted as saying.
"Afterwards, they
brought her back. I asked her what happened and how they did it. She said the
doctors told her not to speak," she said, adding that abortions were done
by ISIS' own gynecologists and it left her friend bleeding heavily.
"She could not talk
or walk. She was the first. After that, they took the pregnant women and put
them in a separate house," she said.
Girls and women would be
lined up for "inspection," a 16-year-old girl recalled, saying her
"belly, teeth, breasts" were examined by ISIS men.
A 22-year-old woman said
the man who took her as his "wife" showed her a letter, days after
taking her, which said that a captured woman will become Muslim if 10 ISIS
fighters rape her.
The ISIS man then raped
her, and gave her to his friends. "I was passed on to 11 others."
Yazidi women and girls
were abducted from Iraq's Sinjar province last August. Many of them were later
sold, given as gifts, or bartered for weapons. Some of them committed suicide,
while a few others made unsuccessful attempts.
ISIS is an al-Qaeda
offshoot which has gained control over large territories in Iraq and Syria. The
Yazidi minority is one of its main targets, along with Christians.
There are about 600,000
Yazidis in Iraq, who consider themselves to be Kurds ethnically and live mostly
in north-central Ninevah province and northeastern Iraqi Kurdistan.
Yazidis believe that God
governs the world through seven angels with "Malak Tawous," or
Peacock Angel, as the leader, who disobeyed God's command to bow down to
humanity but was forgiven and made the head angel due to his devotion.
Therefore, Yazidis are accused of worshipping the Devil, or Satan, as the
leader angel resembles Satan in Abrahamic texts.
The ISIS aims to form a
Caliphate in the Levant, a region also known as the Eastern Mediterranean,
through "jihad," and has asked minorities to flee, convert to Islam,
or be killed.
An all-female police
force of ISIS recently released a manifesto which was laced with references to
the Islamic scriptures, encouraging girls as young as 9 to marry Jihadis and
asking women to remain "hidden and veiled" and serve their
"masters.
"It is considered
legitimate for a girl to be married at the age of nine. Most pure girls will be
married by sixteen or seventeen, while they are still young and active,"
it said.
In its English
propaganda publication, ISIS earlier sought to justify its barbarity, saying it
is "Islamic" to capture and forcibly make "infidel" women
sexual slaves.
"Before Shaytan
[Satan] reveals his doubts to the weak-minded and weak hearted, one should
remember that enslaving the families of the kuffar [infidels] and taking their
women as concubines is a firmly established aspect of the Sharia that if one
were to deny or mock, he would be denying or mocking the verses of the Qur'an
and the narration of the Prophet … and thereby apostatizing from Islam,"
stated the ISIS' glossy propaganda magazine "Dabiq," named after a
site in Muslim apocalypse mythology.
