Yazidi community has been abused by IS terrorists.
By Dileep Thekkethil
The war against Islamic State in Syria, Iraq and Libya is getting bloodier with self-proclaimed jihadists being pushed back from their strongholds by forces of coalition foreign countries using combined military attack.
But, there is no respite in the suffering of the sex slaves who were captured by the IS terrorists. The Associated Press reported that IS has deployed watchdogs in different areas to catch any fleeing sex slave – a majority of whom are from the Yazidi community.
According to the report, Islamic State is losing many of its territories but are clinching on to their sex slaves numbering more than 3000 women, including young girls of age 8 to 12.
The latest AP report suggests that the barbaric IS are using modern technologies, including instant messaging apps such as Telegram and WhatsApp for selling sex slaves. The practice is now becoming prevalent among slave owners who sell innocent girls like commodities in the market.
AP quoted a source showing an encrypted message that read “Virgin. Beautiful. 12 years old…. Her price has reached $12,500 and she will be sold soon.”
The report also says that the number of captured slaves fleeing owners have dramatically decreased after the top brass of the self-styled caliphate ordered to create a database of sex slaves, making it difficult for the enslaved girls to cross IS checkpoints.
Mirza Danai, founder of the German-Iraqi aid organization Luftbrucke Irak was quoted saying: “They register every slave, every person under their owner, and therefore if she escapes, every Daesh control or checkpoint, or security force – they know that this girl … has escaped from this owner.”
The IS fighters are also engaged in assassinating smugglers, entrusted by the relatives of captured girls, who promise to bring them back home. The relatives of a few captured slaves told AP that they had to pay heavy ransoms to bring back their captured family members, who are young girls not exceeding the age of 30.
An 18-year-old sex slave named Lamiya who was rescued by smugglers injured her right eye and lost vision when a land mine exploded while she escaped from the clutches of her owner. Lamiya told the agency: “I managed in the end, thanks to God, I managed to get away from those infidels. Even if I had lost both eyes, it would have been worth it, because I have survived them.”
Lamiya is one among the lucky few who managed to escape from coldblooded IS fighters, the mine explosion had killed Lamiya’s companions, 8-year-old Almas, and Katherine, 20.
Recently, Facebook-owned instant messaging app WhatsApp and Telegram, which are used by the IS terrorists to sell sex slaves, had come up with end-to-end encryption technology, which makes any data sent inaccessible to others, including themselves. Both the companies said the new feature will protect the privacy of the users. But, it turns out that Islamic State is misusing the feature and many times the accounts that sending these messages go untraced until someone reports it.
Telegram is extremely popular among the people in the Middle East and the spokesperson of the firm said it is committed to curbing the spreading of abusive content or using the medium for activities like sex trade. He also said that it routinely removes public channels used by IS.
On the other hand, the spokesperson of WhatsApp said they have zero tolerance towards such contemptuous activities done through its service and have disabled many accounts on receiving evidence that proves users are violating the policy terms of the company.
In a bone-chilling account given by Lamiya to AP, she says she was sold many times after her abduction from the village of Kocho, near the town of Sinjar, in the summer of 2014. According to Lamiya, she was sold four times and all four men she was sold to violated her to a degree incomprehensible to most humans. She escaped from the captive of an IS doctor and now is waiting to reunite with rest of the family in Germany.
“We had a nice house with a big farm … I was going to school. It was beautiful,†she said.