Women and girls were raped, enslaved and forced to endure unspeakable atrocities, with girls as young as
nine tested for virginity and many sold into sex slavery.
Some 3,500 women were abducted by Isis and half remain unaccounted for to this day. While others have
escaped, life remains arduous. And those women who had children as the product of rape are faced with the
torturous dilemma of abandoning their babies in order to be allowed back into the Yazidi community, or
keeping the babies but remaining ostracised.
Pari Ibrahim, founder and executive director of the Free Yazidi Foundation, lost many relatives in the Sinjar
massacre, which marked the beginning of Isis’s genocide against the Yazidis – an ethnoreligious group in
Iraq – in August 2014. She still has 17 female members of her family who remain missing. Nineteen were
kidnapped by Isis in total but two managed to escape. Some 21 men from her family were taken but she
assumes none of them are alive.
“We assume the men are dead,” she tells The Independent. “The women who came back told us the men
were massacred and the elderly women also. They are my cousins and other relatives.”
Ibrahim, whose organisation helps those Yazidi civilians worst affected by the Isis attacks, says those Yazidi
women whose children are the result of rape by Isis militants face many difficulties due to not being
welcomed back in the community with their children.
The Yazidi Spiritual Council, the supreme body tasked with binding religious decisions for Yazidis, decided
these children could be accepted into the Yazidi community with their mothers back in April. But a
clarification was issued just days later – partly prompted by fierce anger and consternation from the Yazidi
population – which explicitly warned such children would not be welcomed.
“No one knows how many children were born of Isis,” Ibrahim says. “We support women with whatever
they choose to do. If they want to put the baby up for adoption or the keep the baby – it is their choice.
When Yazidi women who escape out of captivity and flee Isis come back, it is like they are a body without a
soul
“Of course, it is very difficult to live in the community if the child faces stigma. We know of cases where
Yazidi families take the child away by force and put them up for adoption or give them to organisations that
find a family or put them in an orphanage. These women are left very sad. Yazidi women survivors are left
out of discussions.”
She says the organisation, which is based in the Netherlands, had put one Yazidi mother in contact with
their child who was adopted by another family.
“When Yazidi women who escape out of captivity and flee Isis come back, it is like they are a body without
a soul,” Ibrahim says. “They have no hope any more and see no future. All they want to do is sit in a tent and
mourn for their family members and lost life. It is very difficult to compare the girl before she was
kidnapped with her now she is sat in a tent or an unfinished building.
“I started the foundation to give Yazidis a chance to rebuild their lives. We have seen a lot of change with
women we have been treating.”
She says one Yazidi woman, who lost her whole family in the massacre, had gone from saying she no longer
wanted to live and asking why she was alive to becoming a yoga teacher at the Free Yazidi Foundation. She
says the help she received has been transformative and she is now far happier.