Yazidi Girls Tell of Escape from IS

Besma was taken to Mosul, where she was eventually separated from her mother and brother and moved to the town of Baaj, near the Syrian border, with around 100 other girls, who had been picked out by IS commanders and fighters. She was one of six girls to be selected and taken to Rambusi village, near Sinjar town.

In Rambusi at night, IS members took turns “bringing the girls back to their residence,” Besma’s euphemism for being raped. She remembers the names of three IS members who systematically raped the girls: Abu Hussein, Abu Ali and Abu Abdullah (whose nickname was Abu Shadad).

One evening, around two weeks after Besma arrived in Rambusi, 15 IS militants, including her captors, gathered in a house on the edge of the village. Besma and another girl, Berivan, decided to make a run for it. “We served them okra stew and rice, and all of them sat down to eat,” Besma said.

While the men ate, Besma and Berivan, 18, walked quietly to the front door of the house, grabbed a Samsung mobile phone that one of the fighters had left to recharge and stepped into the darkness outside. Berivan called her brother to ask for his help. Over the next 48 hours, Berivan’s brother and a few other Yazidi fighters guided the two terrified girls to safety.

There were many frightening moments along the way. At one point, one of the militants, Abu Sarhan, called the phone the girls had taken. "Where are you, Berivan?” Besma remembers Abu Sarhan asking. The militant, who had repeatedly raped Berivan, warned the girls they would soon be caught. They switched the phone off and pushed on.

The two girls kept going until they reached Mount Sinjar, where several Yazidi fighters received them. One of the men, Khero, spoke by phone to Al-Monitor, recalling the two exhausted girls walking up the mountain one day in late September.

Besma and Berivan are now safe, but their ordeal is far from over. Besma’s mother and brother remain missing. "Not a day passes without her crying," Erivan said. Besma spends her time watching videos released by IS, listening repeatedly to a Kurdish folk song about a mother and weeping while looking at photographs of her two missing brothers.

Since early December, Kurdish peshmerga forces and Yazidi fighters backed by coalition airstrikes have retaken large parts of Sinjar and the Mosul dam area east and west of the Tigris, some 4,000 square kilometers (15,444 square miles), according to officials from the Kurdistan Region Security Council. With the Kurdish forces gaining ground, there is a possibility that one day the Yazidis might feel confident enough to return to their ancestral homeland.