I was nine years old when ISIS invaded Sinjar. I was one of a family of eleven.
When they abducted us in June 2014, every moment was difficult. Every day was the same, moving from one place to another, from one city to the next.
During my captivity, I was sold six times. Every time, it was a different story: torture, beatings, forced prayer, rape, humiliation, and psychological abuse.
There is so much I cannot say because of my mental state. I become exhausted, and I cannot speak in detail about the rape. This pain is immense. Time cannot erase it, and the days will never make me forget those moments.
Our lives had once been ordinary, with both joys and hardships. Despite our modest circumstances, my family was one of farmers, raising livestock, and travelling to Rabia to cultivate the land.
Even though we were poor, we were happy. We lived in peace and enjoyed the childhood we should have had. But everything changed in 2014, when our story became a nightmare, a world of oppression and cruelty.
It was not long before we were captured in the Qandil area of Sinjar. I did not understand what was happening, but I could see the fear in everyone’s eyes. They first took us to the Civil Status Directorate, which had become one of the first government buildings they seized after entering Sinjar. Later, they transferred us to Badoush Prison in Mosul.
We remained there for some time before being moved to a school in Tal Afar. From there, we were taken between several locations, including Kasr Mihrab and Qizil Qiyu in Tal Afar district.
At the time, I did not realise that these moments marked the beginning of my suffering, the beginning of a new chapter of endless injustice.
After a while, they separated me from my family. was moved from one place to another without understanding what was happening. Then ISIS fighters arrived and began distributing the girls as though they were property, as though we had no right even to exist.
Each fighter took his “share”. I was one of those “shares”, a little girl, only nine years old, suddenly turned into a captive, turned into a slave.
One of them took me to Mosul, where my ordeal truly began. I was treated without mercy. I saw every form of suffering and lived a life that felt like hell. I wished for death every single day, but even that was not an option.
Every time they sold me, I died a thousand times. Over five years, I was sold six times. They traded us as though we were merchandise. The sales were not always for money; sometimes girls were given as gifts to ISIS fighters after battlefield victories. We were their spoils of war.
The abuse did not end with human trafficking. They forced us to learn the Qur’an and to pray. Anyone who refused faced beatings, torture, and sometimes death. We no longer knew the difference between day and night. Fear ruled our lives, and we spent our nights awake, waiting only for the unknown.
Once, I was in an apartment in the Syrian city of Raqqa when bombing began. I did not understand what was happening, but I spent the entire night trembling with fear, expecting to die at any moment.
I did not know whether I would leave that place alive. That night has haunted me ever since. Even today, any sudden loud sound or a door slamming shut brings back memories of that terrifying night.
In Syria, they moved me through several places, from Idlib to Aleppo, from Baghouz to other locations whose names I no longer remember.
I was only a child, yet I endured the worst forms of suffering. On one occasion, they took me into the desert. In the Syrian areas controlled by ISIS, they frequently moved the girls from place to place for buying and selling or because of the bombardment. I lived through days of darkness that can never be forgotten. Every minute felt like years because of the pain and abuse.
During five years of enslavement, I endured every form of violence. There was no type of torture that ISIS members did not inflict upon us.
We were held in their prisons, but even the prisons sometimes felt more merciful than the lives we were forced to live. We were treated like animals, without the most basic rights, without mercy, without even the smallest trace of humanity from our captors.
In the final stage of my captivity, I was transferred to Al-Hol camp in Northeast Syria, near the Iraqi border, where I remained for five months. Those months were not simply an addition to the years of suffering—they were among the worst periods of my life.
The camp was full of women who had endured the same hell, but it was also an extension of the prison we had already been living in.
I saw the camp as another prison. There was no difference between the faces of the women there and those of the ISIS fighters. It has been contended that some of these women had also participated in killings and rape.1
The suffering extended to food and healthcare. Life in Al-Hol camp was difficult in every respect, especially when it came to security.
We could not reveal our identities. What I hated most was the way the women treated us and the beliefs they held.
In 2019, we were freed from the camp with the help of the Yazidi House in Syria, an organisation run by Syrian Yazidis. The Yazidi House coordinated with the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), who managed to rescue me and get me out of the camp.
After our rescue, we were taken to the Zakho camp. There, I was reunited with some members of my family—my brothers and my mother—who had also been freed.
But the fate of my six sisters remains unknown. To this day, we still do not know what happened to them. Each of us has her own story of imprisonment, being sold, torture, and abuses too painful to describe. When I returned to Sinjar, I did not find my city as I had left it. Everything had been destroyed, as though the war had spared nothing. Yet I was immediatelyconfronted with another battle: living in a city without services, without security, and without rights. The government gave us nothing but promises, and none of those promises became reality.
Every survivor was welcomed with ululations and chocolate, and the Yazidi community has been the main source of support for those who returned. Some members of the community have even paid large sums of money to recover abducted girls from ISIS fighters.
The Yazidi community treated us well. Many Yazidi spiritual leaders declared that these women were “our daughters“ and insisted that what had happened to us should never be considered a source of shame. On the contrary, they described us as saints and offered us psychological and social support.
In 2021, the Iraqi Parliament passed the Yazidi Female Survivors Law, which included the establishment of a rehabilitation centre for survivors. But to this day, that provision has not been implemented. The law granted us rights to education, monthly financial support, land, and employment. Yet those rights have largely remained promises on paper.
The psychological and social support we received did not come from the government, but from civil society organisations and initiatives such as Nadia Murad’s Initiative. As for the land plots we were promised, only a small number of survivors have received theirs, while most remain on waiting lists. We are told that there is no land available within Sinjar municipality, but we know this is simply an excuse to prolong our suffering. I have yet to receive a plot of land, although I do receive a monthly stipend because I am recognised as a survivor.
When I came home, I was welcomed with great warmth by my people. People regarded me as almost saintly within my community. Everyone was proud of us because we had survived. What happened to us is a stain on the conscience of humanity. Yet despite that, women’s rights in Sinjar—and especially the rights of survivors—remain neglected.
Many survivors could not stay. They left for Europe in search of a new life, far from the memories that haunt them on every corner of this city.
As for me, fear still controls my life. Every part of Sinjar, every street in Mosul, and every road in Tal Afar or Ba’aj reminds me of ISIS’s brutality and makes me wonder: Can I live here? Can I ever move beyond this pain?
Despite everything I have lived through, the same questions continue to occupy my mind. Why did this happen to us? Why so much injustice? And how much longer will we carry this wound without seeing justice?
