Yazidi sex slave sold to Isis fighter with 10-year-old sister 'was gang-raped, beaten and scalded with boiling water in nine-month ordeal'
An aid worker shares a harrowing account from one teenager
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Your support makes all the difference.A Yazidi teenager who was sold to an Isis fighter has described how she was beaten and gang-raped on a daily basis in a harrowing account of her nine month ordeal.
The 17-year-old, who is now believed to be three months pregnant, was sold into sexual slavery at an 'auction' after militants overran the town of Sinjar, according to an aid worker who claims to have helped her after she fled from Isis.
Delal Sindy, who describes herself as a Kurdish activist, said the girl remembered her time being held captive by the group as “like choosing between death and death”.
Sindy said she was repeatedly gang-raped, whipped and had boiling water poured on her thigh in the months that followed. The Independent has been unable to verify this account.
The girl was moved from Iraq to the group’s stronghold in Raqqa, Syria, where she and other girls who were also sold into sexual slavery allegedly underwent invasive ‘tests’ to determine that they were still virgins.
“The day me and my sister were sold was the last day I saw my mother,” she was quoted as saying. “I will never forget when she started crying and pulling her hair when they took us.”
The teenager said the Chechen militant, who called himself Al-Russiyah, and his team of bodyguards would force her to recite passages of the Koran while assaulting her.
“He beat me and would be with at least one other man every time he had sex with me,” she said.
Al-Russiyah also took two other girls at the same auction, where her 10-year-old sister was sold to a "high-profile" fighter. She said Al-Russiyah would strip all of them naked and choose a girl each morning. After he had made his choice, his bodyguards would also choose a girl to sexually assault.
The girl finally managed to escape when Al-Russiyah and his bodyguards were killed by Peshmerga forces near Sinjar, but her ordeal is far from over.
"My father is dead, I have no idea where my mother and sister are," she told Sindy. "What have I to live for? I try to forget everything, but even when I close my eyes I see them in front of me. I want to kill myself."
A recent report by Human Rights Watch found Isis fighters are committing widespread, organised and systematic rape and sexual assault on Yazidi women and girls in what may amount to a crime against humanity.
Yazidi women who escaped their captors have given harrowing accounts of their abuse at the hands of fighters. The organisation spoke to girls as young as 12 after they escaped their captors in northern Iraq, who described being gang-raped by brutal fighters multiple times. Many had also witnessed other women and young girls being sexually assaulted.