The Sunday Times: Escape from Isis: Christina Lamb meets the Yazidi women fighting for justice

Monday April 30 2018
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Escape from Isis: Christina Lamb meets the Yazidi women fighting for justice

Four years after the Yazidi genocide, we speak to the women who escaped sexual slavery and the brave souls who secured their freedom
Former Isis captives in Khanke camp in northern Iraq
Former Isis captives in Khanke camp in northern Iraq
ALEX KAY POTTER
The Sunday Times, April 29 2018, 12:01am
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The Monday-morning yoga class is full of young women. As the instructor tells them to breathe slow and deep, they squirm and fidget, struggling to settle. Tacked on the walls are drawings, including one of four girls in hijabs chained together. Every member of the class, including the instructor, has survived being kept as a sex slave by Isis fighters, raped and repeatedly sold on. A few weeks ago, one of the group, Khalida, 20, committed suicide by hanging herself.

Outside stretches a muddy field of white canvas tents. Khanke camp, near Dohuk, northern Iraq, shelters some of the 420,000 Yazidis who were forced from their homes when Isis swept into their areas in northern Iraq in August 2014. Men were slaughtered, women and girls enslaved for sex, and boys taken for indoctrination and military training. The attempted extermination of the hitherto little-known minority of gentle people who pray to the sun and worship a peacock angel — but whom Isis call devil-worshippers — prompted an international outcry and was declared a genocide by the UN.

Isis may have been driven out of Iraq, but almost four years after the attack the Yazidi population remains in limbo. Their beloved homeland of Sinjar, under the mountain where they believe Noah’s Ark came to rest, is in ruins, their fruit trees burnt and goats stolen, landmines lie hidden all around and the area is disputed between Iraqi and Kurdish militias. Many of the perpetrators of rape and murder remain at large.

Outside the yoga class, one woman, Sevvi Hassan, 45, in the long, puritanical white dress typical of older Yazidi women, recounts what she and her family found when they tried to return home in the autumn. “Everything was rubble,” she says. “Our house had no door or roof or windows, there was no water or electricity and no people, just ghosts. We’d been well off, with orchards of pomegranates, figs, olives and grapes, 90 sheep and 30 goats, but everything was gone.”
Healing time: a yoga class at Kanke Camp
ALEX KAY POTTER

Worst of all were the memories of the Kalashnikov-toting men in black from whom they had fled to the mountain. So traumatised was Sevvi’s eldest daughter, Zeena, that she set fire to herself. “When we got back to Sinjar she was scared, all the time feeling Isis was coming. She was so desperate to save herself from them, she poured petrol over herself and lit a match.”

The 28-year-old mother of four was so badly burnt that only one side of her face remains unscathed.

About two-thirds of the 7,000 girls who were abducted have been recovered, but their problems have not ended with escape from Isis. Inside almost every tent is a broken family, torn apart by what they have endured. Many have been physically damaged by repeated rape. Some can’t face going out, others have committed suicide in violent ways. Some daughters have been brainwashed into regarding fellow Yazidis as infidels.

Most of the families are in debt because they borrowed thousands of dollars to rescue their children. All are angry and disappointed that international outrage has not translated into rebuilding their homeland, or into justice for what they suffered. Some 3,154 Yazidis are still missing, many of them women and girls.

When the West declared victory against Isis after driving them out of Mosul and Raqqa last year, it did nothing to rescue the girls. It even allowed a convoy of about 3,500 people to escape Raqqa, which included fighters and, perhaps, their enslaved girls.

Yazidis are taking matters into their own hands. Some are working with the human-rights lawyer Amal Clooney to seek justice (see panel). A beekeeper, the first female Yazidi MP and a lawyer are among the people risking their lives to rescue their women and children, and trying to catch the perpetrators.
Life after Isis: Turko with her twins, born after she was rescued from Isis
ALEX KAY POTTER

One of those they rescued is Turko, 28, who cradles two gorgeous five-month-old twins in her arms, her soft face framed by a cascade of long glossy hair. Her tent is cosy, with a bed, TV, gas heater and piles of pink quilts and cushions, but it is still a tent far from home. Turko escaped from Raqqa with her three daughters in November 2016 after almost 2½ years in captivity, and seems full of spark. But as she recounts what happened, tears spill from her eyes.

Her husband and brother were away working in Kurdistan when Isis swept into their village of Herdan, and captured Turko and her three daughters, aged 3, 6 and 8. Moved to various places, they ended up captives of a Saudi Isis commander called Haider, who raped her and forced the three girls to study the Koran. “He was forcing me to have sex with him, hurting me, and I feared he would do the same to my girls,” Turko tells me. She tried to escape, but the house was guarded. “He told me if you don’t stop trying to run away I will take your daughters. Anyone who tried to run away he would electrocute. Isis was cutting off heads and they made us watch, even the children. They would hang the headless corpses for days and we would pass them on the way to the mosque and back.”

One night, as he was forcing himself on her, she told him: “One day you will all be finished.” Enraged, he threw her and her daughters in an underground jail for three months where they could not wash and had little food. “I didn’t care about myself. If it was just me I would have committed suicide,” she says, crying. “But I was with my daughters. When we got out we were in such a bad state they took us to hospital. We had typhoid.”

Back with her Saudi captor, Turko concluded there was no hope. “All that torture and rape — death was better for us,” she says. “I tried to kill us all, put fuel over us and was about to set us on fire, but one of my daughters stopped me.”

One day in November 2016, the Saudi commander was away in Mosul fighting the Iraqi forces that had launched a campaign to recapture the city. He had left Turko money for food, so she paid to borrow a Syrian woman’s ID, put on a niqab like an Isis wife, then went to an office that had wi-fi and sent a WhatsApp message to her brother. “It was very dangerous,” she says. “If they’d caught me they would have burnt me alive in a big cage, but I was desperate because of my daughters.”

Her brother gave her the number of a Yazidi beekeeper called Abdullah Shrim, who used to sell honey in Aleppo before the war, and had rescued scores of girls after many of his own family had been taken captive. Shrim told Turko to tell her mother to collect money — $32,000 — for her and her daughters from a kidnap office set up by the Kurdish government.

Turko gave him the location of the house, near a downed plane, and the times of day when the Saudi usually went out, and Shrim put her in contact with an Arab smuggler. When an airstrike began, the smuggler told her that now was the time to run. But her girls didn’t want to leave.

“They had brainwashed my daughters, particularly the eldest, Rehan,” she says. “On our way to escape she was screaming, ‘Don’t take us back to the infidels!’ They were angry and complaining, ‘We’re not praying or fasting so we won’t go to paradise.’ ”

Once outside Raqqa, Turko and the girls had to walk for four days with nothing to eat or drink, except once when they came across a water tank. At one point Turko tripped and hurt her ankle, so the smuggler carried her. “It was very scary, always thinking we would be captured,” says Turko.

Finally they came to a village in Kobane, which was controlled by Syrian Kurds, and they were safe. “I shouted whoo!” she laughs. “I was super happy.”

The next day they woke at dawn and prayed. One of the other Yazidis asked: “What are you doing? You’re not in the Islamic State any more.”

“Look at us!” says Turko, showing a video on her phone of her and her three daughters all clad in black hijabs.
Isis forced Turko’s other three children to wear black hijabs and to witness beheadings

Coming back has not been easy. “I was so happy to see my husband, but also not happy because of what had happened and not knowing if he would accept me,” she says. “It’s been over one year now and still I can’t look at him normally.”

Nevertheless, the couple were soon expecting twins, whom she lovingly cradles now. Her older daughters were so indoctrinated that they still regard their fellow Yazidis as infidels. “The girls are always talking about religion and think of themselves as Muslims. I told them Muslims are cutting off hands and heads of people and they reply, ‘They deserve it.’ They won’t talk to their uncle or cousins.”

Like most women I speak to, Turko says she is terrified of going back to Sinjar. Instead she wants to leave the country. “Just take us out of Iraq, because Iraqi people did this to us,” she pleads.

The Yazidis’ situation has been complicated by the Kurdish referendum last September, which demanded independence. Baghdad retaliated and sent Iraqi forces to places previously controlled by the Kurds, including Sinjar. Then, last month, Turkey threatened an incursion into Sinjar, with the aim of driving out PKK fighters — Kurdish rebels.

“The whole thing is a mess,” says Ameena Saeed Hasan, who was one of two Yazidi MPs in the Iraqi parliament until she stepped down in 2014 in protest at the failure to protect her people. “Different forces are protecting and contesting areas, so people are afraid to go back. There are no services. My town, Khanesor, is controlled by the PKK; the next place is 20km away and controlled by the Iraqi army; Sinjar city by Hashed al-Shaabi [an Iranian-backed Shia militia] …”

Hasan and her husband, Khaleel al-Dakhi, a lawyer, have dedicated the past few years to rescuing Yazidi girls. “To start with, our plan was just to document who was missing and what we knew about them, because this thing seemed bigger than us and we thought there would be some government somewhere who would help these girls be rescued,” says Aldakhi. “But no one did.” So far, they have retrieved 265 girls.

Shrim, the beekeeper, a slight, grey-haired 43-year-old father of four with metal-rimmed glasses and a sheepish air, looks an unlikely hero. “I came through bees to support women’s rights,” he says, and then explains: “Here in the Middle East we’re in a society where, when someone gives birth to a boy, there are parties and songs and people bring sweets, but when it’s a girl they don’t do anything. So I always see girls and women who are oppressed and have their rights restricted. But, raising the bees, I could see they were ruled by the queen bee at the centre and their society was very organised and worked very well. So why does our world have to be different? I started researching women leaders. And after Isis came and stole these women, I decided to do something about it.”

Fifty-six members of Shrim’s own family were captured by Isis and he was shocked that nobody was doing anything to recover them. When his 16-year-old niece called him from captivity in Raqqa on October 27, 2014, he resolved to act.

“I’d never done anything like this, never worked with smugglers or crossed borders secretly,” he tells me. But from his time selling honey, he knew trading networks, so he asked their advice. They told him to use cigarette smugglers. “Under Isis, cigarettes were forbidden — haram, like us Yazidis — but they still wanted them,” he explains. “So they told me if you want to get the girls out, you have to go with cigarettes. But girls will be more expensive.”

The first time he was terrified, but he found a Kurdish driver and all went smoothly. Over the past 3½ years he has rescued 367 people from Isis. For each rescue, he develops a plan with his son, an engineer. In one case, where eight Yazidi women and children were in a heavily guarded house, Shrim sent in coffins and a funeral car, pretending two of the children had died and needed to be buried. That almost led to disaster when Isis guards insisted they would dig the graves. “I thought the children were going be buried alive,” he says. “We managed to get them all out when the men went for their tools.”

Often, Shrim rents safe houses where contacts can watch comings and goings, or to move the girls to, so they are not passing through checkpoints when the alarm is raised. He even rented a bakery to deliver bread as a way to check if the girls were still in houses where Isis was holding them captive. “We tried so many ways,” he says. “We got women to distribute clothes to other women, as then they could enter the house and see faces uncovered.”

It is dangerous work. Five men and a young woman working with the network in Syria were executed by Isis after being caught. Shrim receives frequent threats.

“They sent me my photo in Dohuk to say, ‘We can kill you wherever we want.’ One girl I rescued told me, ‘Isis have your picture, they are going to kill you.’ ” He shrugs. “My life is not more important than the tears of my niece or the other 366 I have liberated.”

Over time it has become harder and more expensive to get them out, particularly as many have been moved to Turkey, where authorities refuse to co-operate. Some are believed to have been sold into prostitution rings in Europe. He believes that perhaps 1,000 are still alive, but many are dead.

The last girl he freed was another niece, Khitab, who had been abducted when she was just nine. He shows a photo of her, taken after she was liberated last month from the northern Syrian city of Idlib, where she had been held by Jabhat al-Nusra, al-Qaeda’s Syrian branch. “She was sold to so many men and raped,” he says, shaking his head. He had tried to rescue her before using an ambulance, but on the way out they caught her again. “They tortured her so many times after that,” he says.

This time, she was staying near Idlib’s general hospital, so he told her to go there when her captor went out for Friday prayers and stand outside holding a white bag. “I told her to wait for a man to come and say, ‘I am Abdullah.’ ” He and his wife were waiting in a minibus across the border. He shows me a photograph of them all reunited.

Shrim longs for the days when they can go back to Sinjar and his quiet life of keeping bees. In the meantime his phone doesn’t stop ringing. Every time he rescues someone, the families of those still missing contact him to see if the new arrival has brought any fresh information.
The beekeeper: Abdullah Shrim went from selling honey to rescuing scores of girls from Isis

Among those anxiously awaiting news is Nasima, who sits cross-legged on the floor of her tent, her little boy Hussain clinging to her anxiously. Her face is swollen with sadness and she looks much older than her 35 years. On her phone is a picture of a teenage girl in a blue party dress — her eldest daughter, Inas, 19, whom she hasn’t seen since they were both taken captive in 2014. Also missing is her son Sabah, 15.

“I know what they did to me in captivity, so I keep thinking of my son and daughter and what they’re going through,” she says. “No one cries like a mother. Every night I’m crying and thinking of it. To the last day of my life I will relive it.”

Nasima and her four children were captured on the afternoon of August 4, 2014, the day after Isis moved into the Yazidi area. They were fleeing from their village of Tilbanat, which means Hill of Girls, after being separated from her husband and their eldest son, who had gone to borrow a vehicle and whom she has not seen since. Many of the men were shot dead. “A big group of Isis came with weapons, all in black and very scary,” she says. Sabah, who was 12 at the time, was taken off while she and her two daughters, Inas and Renas, then 15 and 14, were taken to a large farm in Tal Afar.

“There were about 25 women and girls,” she says. “Everything was very dirty — they were spitting in our food and peeing in the water and they put drugs in it to make us sleepy. They forced us to pray and read the Koran and beat us if we didn’t.”

Every so often men came and selected girls, starting with young virgins. Inas was one of the first chosen. “When they took her, I was crying and crying,” says Nasima. After that Renas held her baby brother, pretending he was her child.

After a couple of weeks, the remaining women and girls were moved to a village where other Yazidis, including Nasima’s son Sabah, had been taken. “They were brainwashing the boys,” she says. “Beating them if they didn’t pray, making them do military training and showing them how to behead people. I fell down dizzy when I saw.”

They spent two months there, then Nasima, Renas and baby Hussein were loaded onto a bus with other women and girls and taken to Raqqa, to what she describes as an underground prison. On the sixth day a Tunisian fighter came and bought Nasima and her baby, leaving Renas behind.

Nasima found herself kept as a slave. “From morning till midnight I was working for his family, cooking, washing clothes and cleaning, not just his house but the place where Isis fighters all gathered. He even made me clean the house of his friend who was getting married.”

Asked if he did anything else, she looks at me witheringly. “Nobody came back without raping,” she replies.

She was sold a couple of times, ending up with an Isis leader, Jezrawi, who took her to al-Shadadiya, another Syrian town, where Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the head of Isis, sometimes visited. “Jezrawi was some kind of emir and had about 250 Yazidi women and girls with him,” she says. “He raped every single one then, every two or three days, was selling and buying new ones.”

Nasima was kept on, however. “He had a young wife of 16 and she told him not to sell me because I was doing all her work, cooking, washing dishes, even cleaning the ceiling. The house was very dirty, full of all the hair of the girls.”

Nasima and Hussein slept in the room used to store weapons. “It was full of guns, gunpowder and ammo, grenades, everything for fighting. Once, I was washing the dishes and came back to the room and saw my son playing with a bomb.”

One day, Jezrawi told her and his wife to get in the car. “He drove us to a place in al-Shadadiya and stopped and asked me to roll down the window. Then he beheaded a person in front of us. I’d never seen anything so horrible. I was crying and didn’t know what to do.”

When they got home he told her “you Yazidis are pagans”. She retorted: “Are we the pagans or you who are beheading?”

Jezrawi was furious and threatened to register her son as his and send him for training. “Later, his wife told me he had taken Hussein. I ran after his car, but he came out and pushed me to the ground with his rifle butt and whacked my head three times so it cracked — still now it hurts. After all this beating he was raping me and I refused, so he put his hands round my throat and said Rassoul, their Islamic messenger, told them it’s OK to rape those of us nine and older.”

Shortly after that Jezrawi took an even younger second wife, of 15. The first wife was so angry, one day she told Nasima it was their chance to escape. She put her in a hijab and bundled her into a waiting car that took her, Nasima and Hussein to Turkey. From there, Nasima contacted her family, who paid $13,000 to smugglers to get them out.

Her two daughters were still missing, though. Toying with a gold R on a necklace, Renas recounts how she was taken the day after her mother by two men. “They took me to another house in Raqqa, where there were four other Yazidi girls, and kept me there four days, then took me to another house of a big Arab family.”

“I was made to work as their servant, cleaning, sweeping and serving them. I got very tired, but if I stopped, they would beat me. They also showed me the Koran and told me I must pray like them.”

Although that family kept her for two years, they “sublet” her after a couple of months to an Isis fighter for sex whenever he came back from battle. “He’d go off fighting then came back raping,” she says. “He was forcing me, they raped every girl. I tried to resist, but he tied me down.”
Free but tormented: Renas (left) and her mother, Nasima, bear the scars of their ordeal
ALEX KAY POTTER

Twice she tried to escape, but each time the family caught her and beat her. After that she was sold to different men, who also tied her down to force her to have sex and beat her if she resisted.

When the battle to recapture Raqqa from Isis began last June, their area was pounded by American airstrikes. Eventually, she took advantage of the bombing to flee and managed to persuade an Arab family to contact her family and arrange for her to be sent back in return for money.

She finally got out last October after more than three years in captivity. Though she was overjoyed to be reunited with her mum, she worries about her sister Inas, who has also ended up in Raqqa. Renas hasn’t heard from her since the bombing of the city last year. “When I first got back, I was having very bad dreams every night, dreaming of the night they took us and thinking those things will happen again,” she says.

Eventually, a Yazidi from the same village persuaded her to go to classes organised by the Free Yezidi Foundation (FYF), which runs the yoga as well as music, art, English and counselling sessions. Renas now works for them as a health assistant, which, she says, takes her mind off thinking about what happened and earns her a little money.

Mother and daughter are now deeply in debt, with no prospect of paying back the $14,000 they borrowed for their rescue. Nasima says that some in the community still shun them, even though the baba sheikh, the Yazidi spiritual leader, issued a proclamation to say girls abducted by Isis were innocent. “They raped us by force in captivity, but not every Yazidi thinks like that,” says Nasima.

The Yazidi sect is strictly closed, perhaps because the Isis onslaught was only the most recent of many attempts over the centuries to wipe them out. Many wear red and white twisted-thread bracelets to remind them of the blood of what they say are 73 previous ferman, or genocides. A child must be born a Yazidi to worship as one, and adults must marry within the religion. In the past any sexual contact with a non-believer has meant banishment.

Many of the girls who had babies by Isis fighters fear their children won’t be accepted by the community. “Yes, that’s a step too far,” said Murad Ismael, executive director of Yazda, the main activist group for Yazidis. He believes some of the abducted girls are still inside Mosul or in camps with Isis supporters because they fear having to give up their children if they come home.

“Escaping Isis is only the beginning,” says Pari Ibrahim, a young US-based Yazidi lawyer who lost 19 girls and 21 men from her own family. She was so shocked, she founded the FYF to provide a safe space for women of Khanke camp to attend classes and meet with a British psychologist. “The trauma is immense,” she says. “So great was the need that, on the first couple of days, our psychologist had 90 individual sessions.”

That first psychologist was Ginny Dobson, a grandmother from Dorset who spent last year in Khanke funded by the Department for International Development (DfID). “I saw the most profound grief and unbelievable loss,” she says. “A huge amount of medication was being taken, some were drinking or self-harming.”

She read up on Yazidi culture and tried to harness their rituals to help the women, aged from 14 to 55. “We used the music, dancing, singing and prayer as well as art,” she says. “They may never recover, but we can help them heal and rekindle hope by building friendships.”

The results have been impressive. Most women who attend say their nightmares have ended. Ibrahim cites Zainab, abducted with all her sisters and now alone, as “going from someone sitting in an unfinished building not going out to someone glowing”. Zainab is now the yoga teacher.

But it is a massive task. A recent survey of the camp found 69% of inhabitants to be suffering from PTSD, compared with 30.6% in a normal community in conflict. Khanke alone has seen four suicides and 13 attempts, while 300 exhibit suicidal tendencies.

And FYF’s work is a tiny drop in the ocean. Khanke is just 16,200 people, with a further 12,000 outside. But 85% of the entire Yazidi community are in camps — some 350,000 people — and no other camps have trauma psychologists.

“I’ve heard from the community that around 10 or more Yazidis commit suicide in Duhok every week,” says Ibrahim.

Many feel angry that, having gone through the painful process of telling their stories to the media, they have not been given help. Yazda’s Murad Ismael cites a woman with TB who could not raise the $700 she needed for hospital treatment.
Graphic tale: the drawing by a survivor at Khanke camp of four girls chained together

“We have been asking for international protection until we have dry mouths, but it’s not happening,” he adds. “In Sinjar there is no water, no electricity, no teachers and our mayors and council fled when Iraq took over. This genocide destroyed both the physical and emotional existence of our people. My fear is we have something like Palestinian refugee camps that will be here for ever and our people will have a sub-life of hopelessness.”

In September, the UN Security Council approved a British proposal to establish an international investigation team. The UK has donated £1m, but it has yet to be formed.

Although at least 94 mass graves of Isis victims have been found in northern Iraq, Ismael says none has been exhumed and not a single perpetrator has been brought to justice. “We have recorded 1,400 women’s testimonies and have lists of names of Isis militants if someone would take it,” he says.

Amal Clooney warns that time is running out. “Justice will for ever be out of reach if we allow the evidence to disappear: if mass graves are not protected, if medical evidence is lost, if witnesses can no longer be traced,” she has said. “That’s why it’s important that we get the UN investigation off the ground as soon as possible.”

Thousands of alleged members of Isis were captured by Iraqi and Kurdish authorities after the fall of Mosul last year. They are being tried in courts in Nineveh and Baghdad dressed in Guantanamo-style orange jumpsuits, but on blanket charges of terrorism, not war rape. Some of those convicted have been executed.

Jamal Daoud, the chief judge in Nineveh, admits that some of the 490 he has tried so far kept sex slaves, but argues that “if a civilian raped a Yazidi girl, that’s one thing, but if someone joined Isis they have also done killing, beheading and raping, so it all counts as terrorism”.

Daoud comes from Sinjar and complains Yazidis have taken over his house. “Why is the West obsessed with the Yazidis?” he asks. “Many more things happened to all the people, the Arabs and Christians of Sinjar, but no one talks of that.”

He concedes that thousands more Isis fighters are still at large. Some of the Yazidi rescuers, such as Khalil and Ameena, are trying to track them down themselves. One of the girls they rescued in January was Bushra. She had been sold numerous times and her last captor was a 70-year-old man in Deir ez-Zour, in eastern Syria.

Once she was safely back, Khalil created a fake Facebook identity to contact the old man, offering to help get her back. Bushra recorded a voice message to send him, saying if he came to get her, she would go back with him. He took the bait. Khalil shows me a video of him crying into an olive tree, begging, “Please come back, I miss you!”

“We have managed to catch a lot of Isis people like this,” he said.

Clooney insists that proper trials are key to helping women such as Bushra heal. “Many Yazidi survivors have told me they don’t want their abusers executed, they want them tried in a court of law,” she said. “And they deserve nothing less. A lack of accountability prevents healing for survivors and reconciliation between communities.

“Killing Isis on the battlefield is not enough,” she adds. “We must also kill the idea behind Isis by exposing its brutality and in doing so deter future recruits. Every conflict reminds us that there can be no lasting peace without justice. A lack of accountability simply leads to continuing cycles of vengeful violence.”

I meet many Yazidi women who say they see no hope. Those who can, leave. Germany has taken in 1,100 of the sexually abused women and girls; Canada and Australia have taken several hundred. Clooney and her husband, the Hollywood star George Clooney, support a 23-year-old Yazidi called Hazim, who is studying computer science at the University of Chicago.

The UK has taken none and recently refused asylum to five young Yazidi men who managed to make their way there.

“The UK government has been very vocal about genocide and sexual violence, so we can’t understand why they can’t at least take some for treatment,” says Pari Ibrahim.

Alistair Burt, minister for the Middle East, argues it is better to support Yazidi women where they are until they can go home and to fund reconstruction, pointing out that the UK gives £246m in humanitarian aid to Iraq.“What Germany has done is really interesting, but I don’t think [the women] will go back, so you have created a push factor,” he says. “I’m not convinced that the long-term future of Iraq is best provided by removing minority communities who have been persecuted in the past. If the narrative becomes you can leave if you want to, how can you make a case for others to stay?”

Burt refuses to see the Yazidi women as a special case. He says that the Foreign Office gets “pressed very hard” by Christian groups, adding: “Although Yazidis suffered particularly, others have suffered the same way and it’s not always easy to separate one group from another and say they should have preferential treatment, because the circumstances for all have been horrific.”

Over tea in a comfortable room in Whitehall, perhaps that sounds reasonable. But when I think of Turko, Nasima, Renas and all the others in their tents in Khanke, and the absolute terror in their eyes at the idea of moving back to the places where terrorists in black slaughtered their men and robbed them of dignity and virginity, I don’t see how we can refuse.

@christinalamb

For more information and to donate, visit freeyezidi.org
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