I just finished listening to a disturbing book on CD, “The Girl Who Escaped ISIS” by Farida Khalaf. It makes the inconveniences of being in quarantine pale in comparison.
According to Rachel Aspden’s July 1, 2016 article “The Girl Who Beat ISIS: My Story by Farida Khalaf and Andrea C. Hoffman” in The Guardian, in the summer of 2014, the jihadi group that had until then called itself “Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant” seemed invincible. Its fighters swept through north and central Iraq, seizing swaths of territory including Mosul — the country’s second city — and bulldozing earthworks that marked the Syria-Iraq border. Despite their U.S.‑provided equipment and overwhelmingly superior numbers, the Iraqi armed forces fled in the face of ruthless attack columns flying ISIS’s black war banner. The group celebrated these victories by taking the grandiose new name of Islamic State — no more petty geographical limitations. They also announced the establishment of a caliphate: a reimagining of the original pan-Islamic empire led by the Prophet Muhammad, with the cleric Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi at its head.
As westerners followed these distant events in the news, in northern Iraq an 18-year-old girl followed them too, with the same disbelief and pity for ISIS’s victims. Farida Khalaf dreamed of becoming a teacher and in the peaceful village of Kocho, where she played football with her four brothers under the apricot trees, the violence seemed a long way off. But her family were Yazidi, members of a 700,000-strong Kurdish minority who follow a faith based on pre-Islamic traditions. And so, in the eyes of the puritanical ISIS, they were devil worshippers who must be exterminated — or enslaved.
Tony Lagouranis explains the Yazidi religion in his book “Fear Up Harsh: An Army Interrogator's Dark Journey through Iraq:” Yazidi don't have a Satan. Malak Ta'us — an archangel, God's favorite, the Peacock Angel — was not thrown out of heaven the way Satan was. Instead, he descended, saw the suffering and pain of the world and cried. His tears — thousands of years' worth — fell on the fires of hell, extinguishing them. If there is evil in the world, it does not come from a fallen angel or from the fires of hell. The evil in this world is man-made. Nevertheless, humans can, like Malak Ta'us, live in this world but still be good.
“The Girl Who Escaped Isis” is Khalaf’s powerful testimony is co-written with the German author and journalist Andrea C Hoffmann. In its opening chapters, the dismantling of the lives of Khalaf and her fellow Yazidis is nightmarishly rapid and complete. When ISIS arrives in Kocho, the villagers are rounded up and given the chance to convert to the jihadis’ brand of Islam. When they refuse, the men and older boys — including Farida’s father and oldest brother — are killed. The unmarried women and girls, including Farida and her friend Evin, are loaded on to a bus at gunpoint. Their destination is the human market of Raqqa, the new caliphate’s de facto capital in northern Syria. There, they will be sold as sex slaves.
Hoffmann has shaped a series of meticulous interviews with Farida into a first-person narrative that is as gripping as it is appalling. When the girls arrive in Raqqa, they have been so sheltered by their traditional upbringing that they have only a misty concept of what awaits them. “Neither Evin nor I had a precise idea of what [rape] actually meant,” Farida remembers. “All we knew is that we mustn’t in any circumstances allow them to touch our bodies. If we failed to prevent them from doing that our entire families would be dishonored.”
Their fate soon becomes horribly clear. Girls of 13 or 14 are quickly snapped up by high-ranking fighters; at 18 and 24, Farida and Evin are considered undesirably old, but eventually they are also sold. Though she is epileptic, Farida resists their captors with all her might. She fights, kicks, punches, screams, argues, constantly attempts to escape and tries numerous times to take her own life – efforts that win her only beatings to the point of death.
Their experiences confirm the ritualized system of sex slavery that has been described in Isis’s own publications: in reintroducing it, ISIS has gone further than groups such as the Taliban or al‑Qaida. Farida’s “owner” prays before he rapes her. The girls are forced to take contraceptive pills so as not to break Islamic legal injunctions against sex with pregnant slaves and are also made to pray as Muslims. Debating with the fighters about Islam or humanity — as Evin tries to do — proves futile.
What amazes both Farida and her readers are the glimpses of normality amid the horror. When her first buyers drag her from the slave market, she can hardly believe that the sun is still shining, and that Raqqa – the sinister “capital of terror” – has ordinary shops and kiosks selling everything from snacks to football shirts. Similarly, there are hints that life under ISIS control is more complex than it appears. The girls meet civilians forced to work for the group and fighters who have joined under duress. One, a young Syrian man, even tries in a limited way to be kind to them. Their escape, engineered by the perpetually brave and resourceful Farida, leaves them in equally ambiguous territory — dependent on Kurdish smugglers who rescue runaways from ISIS for thousands of dollars a head. The hardheaded telephone-haggling over the girls’ fate between the smugglers and their surviving family members is one of the book’s more subtly shocking passages.
Eventually, in a bleak refugee camp in Iraqi Kurdistan, Farida is reunited with the remains of her family. But freedom brings the book’s final disturbing twist – the escapees are stigmatized by their traditional community and tormented by guilt over their inability to stop the rapes and the resulting “dishonor” to their families. With little medical or psychological support and no future, their only chance is to hope for resettlement in Europe. Amid the policy-wrangling over how to combat ISIS and the cynical calculations of the international powers embroiled in Syria and Iraq, this is a compelling testament to the suffering of ordinary people caught up in violence far beyond their control — and to the particularly terrible price it exacts from women.
In this Tuesday, July 3, 2018 photo, provided by Yazda, a U.S.-based Yazidi rights group, Farida Khalaf looks at a mass grave in her home village of Kocho, northern Iraq. (Yazda via AP)
According to the Associated Press, Ahmed Khudida Burjus, the deputy director of Yazda, a U.S.-based Yazidi rights group, said around 7,000 women and girls were captured and sold into slavery, with nearly half eventually escaping. In Kocho alone, at least 500 men and boys were killed, and 800 women and girls taken away. The group has documented at least 54 mass graves of Yazidis but says a lack of resources has delayed the exhumation of the remains, and that there may be more graves yet to be discovered.
Khalaf has the name of her village, Kocho, tattooed on her hand. The village no longer exists. (Stephanie Jenzer/CBC)
At least 3,000 Yazidi women, girls and children are still unaccounted for. Khalaf said their fate is never far from her mind. “I was in their captivity, and I know how difficult it is to be there. A day feels like a year,” she said. “We prayed every day that the day would pass without beating or torture or rape.”
Khalaf did resettle in Germany through a special program. According to Nahlah Ayed’s Jan. 9, 2017 report “’They raped us; they killed our men’: Psychologist helps Yazidi women recover from trauma of ISIS captivity” for the Canadian Broadcasting Corp., even as the rest of Germany grappled with accommodating a million asylum seekers in 2015, the government of Baden-Wurttemberg state had unilaterally committed to bringing traumatized Yazidi women and providing them with therapy and housing.
Under a special program, several hundred women and their families — 1,100 people in all — were ultimately airlifted over a year for a rare chance at recovery from hellish post-traumatic stress disorder.
They live in more than 20 secret shelters across the state.
As he's taken on the role of psychotherapist to many of the Yazidi women now, Dr. Ilhan Kizilhan's task has only grown — not just helping them overcome deep trauma but also restoring the women's faith in humanity.
"In this case," he explained, "people lost their trust in humanity, and psychotherapy means to give the feeling 'Yes, we have some cruel, evil persons, but the world is not all evil.'" Unsurprisingly, that is a hard sell among the women.
Khalaf keeps photos of family and friends, many of whom she has lost. “Even now when I try, I can't smile with my whole heart,” she said. (Stephanie Jenzer/CBC)
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