Hwayda Ilyas, now 19 years old, was held under the Islamic State (ISIS) for five years, and sold into sexual slavery 12 times. Her captors moved her from Baaj, to Mosul, to Tel Afar, and Raqqah among other places, far from her homeland of Shingal.
Hwayda told Rudaw on June 8, that she had been brought to Anbar from Dashisha, in the southeast of Syria’s Hasakah province, trekking on foot through the vast desert.
“We remained there for nine months. Then there was an American and Federal Police air-borne raid,” said Hwayda.
Hwayda was kidnapped alongside thousands of Yezidi women and children as ISIS overran the Yezidi homeland in 2014.
Some 6,417 Yezidis were abducted by ISIS in 2014 as it swept across northern Iraq. Many Yezidi women endured years of sexual slavery.
Ministry of Interior spokesperson Saad Maan confirmed that Hwayda had been rescued by the Intelligence Directorate of the Federal Police in an interview conducted with her after her rescue.
Hwayda was captured by ISIS alongside her aunt, brothers and mother “while on the road to Duhok,” Hwayda told Maan. They were then taken to Baaj, a small town in Nineveh close to the Syrian border.
For fear of being killed, she converted to Islam.
She was later taken to Mosul and placed in a room of unmarried girls.
She told that captor that she didn’t want to get married. He beat her and told her she would go with him.
She insisted on being taken back to her mother. Instead, she was taken to a family in Tel Afar, where she stay for four months.
There, she was raped by a member of the family, named Abu Jabir. "They raped me because I didn't want to be married into the family”, Hwayda said.
She was last held captive by a man named Abu Obeida, who headed ISIS treks on foot into the Anbar desert.
Visible scars on her body trace the torture she endured under ISIS custody.
“They injured me here [on my forehead] after I did not accept them raping me. They tied my hands up,” said Hwayda. Having forgotten her mother tongue of Kurdish, she spoke to Rudaw in Arabic.
Hwayda’s return has eased the pain of her mother, Shirin Khidir, three of whose sons are still missing.
She hadn’t seen her daughter for five years. She told Rudaw that news of Hwayda’s rescue “was like a dream”.
“I had no news of her for five years and hadn’t seen her since then. We didn’t know where she had been taken to,” Shirin told Rudaw.
According to the most recent data from the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG)’s Yezidi Affairs Office, the fate of 2,992 Yezidis is still unknown.
