IS 'Sex Slave' Victim Tells Of Months Of Abuse

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woman held as a sex slave by Islamic State for seven months has told Sky News she was abused every day and said the jihadists "were not like humans".

The 25-year-old victim said her four children, aged five, six, seven and eight years old, were beaten and abused to ensure she complied with her captor's demands.

IS is known to use Yazidi women as sex slaves as they do not recognise their culture and view them as heathens.


Another

woman, 22, who became pregnant while in captivity was not allowed to bury her dead child who was aged just seven months.

She was rescued, along with 30 other Yazidi men, women and children, by Kurds after being held for a year and a half.

IS extremists rarely allowed the group out of a building after the jihadists moved into Iraq's Sinjar mountains in August 2014.

Some 48 hours after being freed, Sky News met the group of eight families in a Dohuk refugee camp in a Kurdish-controlled area of northern Iraq where they had medical checks following their captivity.

They were all still traumatised from their experience and spoke of horrifying violence, physical and mental abuse, a serious lack of food (not fit for animals, they said), poor hygiene (with little access to water) and constant stress.

They had been smuggled out by a Kurdish group set up to try to track down and free some of the 3,000 Yazidis still being held by IS in Syria.

The 25-year-old, who was rescued in an operation a few months ago, said she had been the sex slave of an IS fighter called Omar.

"He abused me every day," she said.

She was also given contraceptives to ensure she didn't get pregnant and could be abused for longer.

"I cannot tell you how awful these people are. I was so worried that he would take away my children."

"They were not like humans. You cannot imagine it.

"They were very violent and shouting every day. My father and brothers were taken away and even now we don't have any news of them.

"Most probably they were killed but it's better. It's better that they are dead and not in prisons with these people. Even us, we were just wishing to die rather than stay with such people."

With extraordinary bravery, she told us how she protested when Omar planned to sell her on, begging him and threatening to kill herself if he did so. He relented.

She described how her life, despite being free now, is still filled with awful memories and unrelenting fear which still keeps her awake at night.

She said: "My days are difficult. I escaped but I still feel I am under their (IS) hands because I have others who are still in their hands."

"I cannot forget those still there suffering," she sobbed.

"I will tell my children when they are old enough," she said. "They need to know what their parents went through and how it was all caused by religion. They need to know everything."

Among the group recently released were eight children aged from nine months to eight years.

The 22-year-old woman lowered her eyes as she told Sky News she had become pregnant soon after being kidnapped.

The young woman's baby was born in captivity but was unwell and constantly crying. He died seven months later.

"They wouldn't even let us bury the baby," an elderly woman next to her said. Both women broke down in tears.

"'We will never forget this, until we die," the older woman said.

"We have suffered a lot, humiliated there. We were sure they were decapitating us if we did not obey them so we were literally obeying what they were asking us."

The leader of the group said they pretended to convert to Islam. "We did whatever they asked of us," he said.

A few days earlier, the Sky News team was over the border in Syria's Al Shaddadi, the most recent town to be liberated by the Syrian Democratic Front.

Amongst the debris left in the IS family homes, we found a list of Yazidi women who'd been bought and sold at the sex slave market there.

It listed their names, their ages and their new 'owners'. Some of the women traded were still teenagers, according to the document.

We took the list with us when we crossed the border into Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq and handed it to one of the leaders of a group devoted to tracking down kidnapped Yazidis.

He was already familiar with at least three of the names. "We have already rescued these women", he said. "Any information will help."

He also said children as young as eight were being forced into the IS ranks, while other boys aged 14 and 15 were made to fight for the extremist group.

(Sky News)