One eight-year-old was repeatedly sold and raped, while another girl set herself on fire to make herself less attractive to her captors.
These are only two of the more than 1,400 horror stories German doctor Jan Ilhan Kizilhan has heard firsthand from Yazidi women and girls once enslaved by Islamic State extremists in Iraq.
“They have been through hell,” he told reporters in an interview in Geneva.
Kizilhan heads a project that has transported 1,100 women and girls to Germany to help heal their deep physical and psychological wounds.
The project, run by the German state of Baden-Wurttemberg, first began flying in the traumatized victims from northern Iraq in April last year, and brought the last group over earlier this month.
It was in 2014 that authorities in Baden-Wurttemberg decided to act.
At the time, Islamic State militants were making a lightning advance in northern Iraq, massacring Yazidis in their villages, forcing tens of thousands to flee and kidnapping thousands of girls and women to force them into sexual slavery.
The UN has described the Islamic State attack on the Yazidi minority as a possible genocide.
“It is really an urgent situation,” Kizilhan said, calling on other countries and states to follow Baden-Wurttemberg’s example.
The southwest German state budgeted 95 million euros (US$103.9 million) to the project and asked Kizilhan and his team to decide which of the victims could benefit most from the move.
The doctor said another 1,200 Yazidi women and girls once held by the Islamic State would also benefit from similar programs elsewhere — as would the estimated 3,800 believed to remain in captivity, if they make it out.
He explained that the women who managed to escape from the Islamic State found themselves back in their deeply conservative communities in northern Iraq with little to no access to psychological help to work through the unspeakable horrors they had experienced.
“These women really need specialized treatment. If we don’t help them, who will?” he asked, speaking on the sidelines of an international conference of human rights defenders in Geneva.
As Yazidis, who follow a unique faith despised by the Islamic State, the women raped and sometimes left pregnant by the extremists are seen by many in their community as a source of dishonor.
Those who are shunned become impoverished and risk falling into prostitution to support themselves, and a large number commit suicide, Kizilhan said.
“Over the last year, I have documented more than 20 cases of suicide, but this is surely just the tip of the iceberg,” he said, adding the actual number was likely closer to 150.
Kizilhan shuddered as he recalled the case of one girl he had met in a refugee camp in August last year, who suffered burns to more than 80 percent of her body.
“She had no nose, no ears left,” he said, adding that he was even more shocked when he learned what had happened to her.
Islamic State fighters had held the girl and her sisters for weeks, raping and torturing them, before they escaped.
Then one night, sleeping in her tent in the refugee camp, the girl dreamed Islamic State fighters were outside. In a panic, she poured gasoline over herself and lit a match, hoping it would make her so ugly they would not rape her again.
Kizilhan had that girl chartered out immediately for fear she might not survive. She remains in a hospital in Germany after more than a dozen operations, and will still need 30 more types of skin and bone surgery.
Most of the girls and women in the program were between 16 and 20, he said, adding that the oldest was in her 40s.
The youngest was eight.
“[Islamic State fighters] sold her eight times during the 10 months she was held hostage, and raped her hundreds of times,” Kizilhan said, shaking his head in disgust. “This is one of the cases I always have in my mind.”
Due to her young age, the girl would likely benefit greatly from treatment and a new environment, he said, voicing hope that “she could still make something of her future.”
It will take time though, for all of the victims now settling in Baden-Wurttemberg.
Kizilhan said psychotherapy would not start for another three to six months, for fear of retraumatizing the women and girls who have been through hell.
“They need the feeling of security. That is not easy after what they have experienced,” he said.
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi reaffirmed his pledge to replace India’s religion-based marriage and inheritance laws with a uniform civil code if he returns to office for a third term, a move that some minority groups have opposed. In an interview with the Times of India listing his agenda, Modi said his government would push for making the code a reality. “It is clear that separate laws for communities are detrimental to the health of society,” he said in the interview published yesterday. “We cannot be a nation where one community is progressing with the support of the Constitution while the other
CODIFYING DISCRIMINATION: Transgender people would be sentenced to three years in prison, while same-sex relations could land a person in jail for more than a decade Iraq’s parliament on Saturday passed a bill criminalizing same-sex relations, which would receive a sentence of up to 15 years in prison, in a move rights groups condemned as an “attack on human rights.” Transgender people would be sentenced to three years’ jail under the amendments to a 1988 anti-prostitution law, which were adopted during a session attended by 170 of 329 lawmakers. A previous draft had proposed capital punishment for same-sex relations, in what campaigners had called a “dangerous” escalation. The new amendments enable courts to sentence people engaging in same-sex relations to 10 to 15 years in prison, according to the