Saw a man raping 4 women in a row': Former ISIS sex slave recalls ordeal

Kirkuk: A 23-year-old Yazidi woman who was once an Islamic State slave has revealed the barbaric way in which the men treat women and how she was sold to multiple men who didn’t think twice before raping her and subjecting her to unthinkable torture.

"My sister is 16 years old; they married her to seven men. She is still in Syria. . . . I saw a man rape four women in a row. I saw them rip a baby from his mother's breast as he was drinking milk. One man would marry me, then one of his friends would see me and like me, so he would marry me. I was sold to five men," she recalled bitterly in an interview to Foreign Policy.

Farida (name changed) is one of the thousands Yazidi women, who were subjected to Islamic State’s horrifying abuse. She was rescued only two months back and is now under the care of Yazda, an international organisation that helps women who were forcefully held by the ISIS.

ISIS militants consider the Yazidis to be devil-worshippers. It despises the Kurdish-speaking group because Yazidis are not "people of the book", meaning their faith does not adhere to the theological tradition that begins with Abraham of the Old Testament and extends through the Koran.

In 2014, ISIS jihadists massacred Yazidis in Sinjar, forcing tens of thousands of them to flee, and capturing thousands of girls and women as spoils of war.

Farida and was married to another man before the ISIS turned their lives upside down.

“I was at her wedding; we were all dancing. There were more than 2,000 people there. Then ISIS came and took everything away," said Adiba Qasem, who works for Yazda.

Islamic State militants killed five of Farida’s brothers and although her husband is still alive, their relationship has been strained by the haunting memories of the past.

"My husband is still alive, but even if 100 years go by, I will never stop grieving for my brothers and family. I am always sad and crying. My spirit is tired. I will never be able to make him happy. How can I look my husband in the face? He sees a stranger looking back at him," she said.

Another Yazidi woman, Leila (name changed), recalls how she was forced to convert to Islam by the militants. The militants would tell them how they plan to eliminate the faith altogether and would force all of them to accept Islam as their religion.

"But even when we were with them, our hearts were the same. We are still Yazidis. They could rape and torture us, but they could not change our hearts," she said.

Another interview of a former Islamic State man, who is now jailed, sheds some light on the barbaric way these men treat women. When asked how he treated his wife, his first response was how she was always fully covered and was forbidden to go anywhere without him, showing the suppression she faced.

The prisoner was arrested when he was trying to enter Kurdish territory. He has been away from his wife for four months, which means that is wife could have been married off to someone else, because that is how the Islamic State interprets the Sharia law.

When asked about how his wife must feel about having to marry someone else, he says her ‘feelings’ do not matter.

"[My wife] is just a woman, like every other woman," he says coldly. "Women exist to be married and have children. In jihad, feelings do not matter. Women survive; they do not live."