{"id":34120,"date":"2019-03-04T22:23:55","date_gmt":"2019-03-04T22:23:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=34120"},"modified":"2019-03-04T22:23:55","modified_gmt":"2019-03-04T22:23:55","slug":"hopes-for-missing-yazidis-dim-as-extremists-defeat-looms","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=34120","title":{"rendered":"Hopes for missing Yazidis dim as extremists\u2019 defeat looms"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

\nDAHUK: Baseh Hammo was 38 when she was enslaved by militants of Daesh. Raped and abused, she was sold 17 times among members of the so-called \u201ccaliphate,\u201d and moved from city to city across a vast stretch of territory Daesh once controlled in northern Iraq and Syria.<\/p>\n

\nHer ordeal came to an end in January in the Syrian village of Baghouz, when an Daesh member took pity on her as the final battle loomed with US-led Syrian Kurdish forces.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\nHe put her on a truck with his own family and allowed them to leave the village.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\nShe was picked up by Syrian Kurdish forces and reunited with her two daughters in Iraq a few days later.<\/p>\n

\nYet many Yazidis are still missing, five years after Daesh militants stormed Yazidi towns and villages in Iraq\u2019s Sinjar region and abducted women and children. Women were forced into sexual slavery, and boys were taken to be indoctrinated in extremist ideology.<\/p>\n

\nHopes surged last month during a two-week pause in the US-led coalition\u2019s assault on Baghouz that some of the estimated 3,000 Yazidis still unaccounted for would emerge.<\/p>\n

\nBut few turned up among the thousands who streamed out of the tiny village.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\nHussein Karo, who heads the Yazidi Rescue Bureau in Iraq\u2019s regional Kurdish government, said only 47 Yazidis were rescued.<\/p>\n

\nNow, as US-backed forces resume their final assault on Baghouz, Hammo and Farha Farman, another rescued Yazidi woman, said they fear many may never return home and that the offensive endangers Yazidis who are still in the village.<\/p>\n

\nThe two said some are refusing to leave their children behind with their Daesh fathers while others are staying out of conviction, having adopted the extremist ideology. Many are simply too terrified to flee.<\/p>\n

\nHammo said her days as a slave were consumed with loneliness and violence.<\/p>\n

\nShe was sold 17 times. One of her owners, a Swede, would lock her in the home for days without food while he went to fight. Another man, an Albanian, stomped on her hands in his military boots, after she scolded him for buying a nine-year-old slave girl.<\/p>\n

\nIn the Syrian town of Raqqa, once the seat of the caliphate, her nephews, 12 and 13 years old, carried guns and served as guards to a German Daesh fighter. When she invited them to eat with her, they refused, saying she was an infidel. She snapped back at them, \u201cYou\u2019re one of us. You\u2019re infidels, too.\u201d<\/p>\n

\nHammo\u2019s final months in captivity were especially trying as hunger gripped what was left of the caliphate. Bread grew scarce, and she began making dough for herself out of chicken feed. By the time she was brought to Baghouz, she was eating grass and leaves.<\/p>\n

\n\u201cI cannot even look at anything the color green anymore,\u201d said a frail Hammo, her face gaunt, and her hands scarred from the abuse.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\nShe had heard there were still 1,000 Yazidis inside Baghouz, including 130 boys training to become terrorists.<\/p>\n

\nFarman, 21, who arrived in Iraq in early February, feared for her sister and nine young male relatives still missing after being abducted five years ago.<\/p>\n

\nBoth Farman and Hammo, now staying in bleak camps for the displaced in Iraq, said international airstrikes had killed some Yazidis living as slaves in the caliphate.<\/p>\n

\nHammo said she had urged a Yazidi woman married to an Uzbek Daesh fighter to leave Baghouz with her, but the woman, who has had two children with the man, refused.<\/p>\n

\n\u201cShe said she\u2019d blow herself up first,\u201d said Hammo.<\/p>\n

\nAnother Yazidi woman in Bahgouz was forced to give up two of her boys to be trained as Daesh fighters.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\u201cShe said she could not leave without them,\u201d Hammo said.<\/p>\n

\nIn 2014, when Daesh was at the height of its power and its self-styled caliphate spanned a third of both Syria and Iraq, Daesh militants stormed Yazidi communities in Iraq\u2019s Sinjar region.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\nThe extremists, who consider the Kurdish-speaking religious minority to be heretics, enslaved, raped and killed thousands of Yazidis. Close to 200,000 members of the minority fled their homes.<\/p>\n

\nFarman was 17 when she was abducted by Daesh from Sinjar. She was sold to a Syrian man who went on to carry out a suicide operation for Daesh. His family then sold her to a man who beat her savagely for trying to escape \u2014 twice.<\/p>\n

\nThe first time she tried to flee, she slipped out with a group of other Yazidi women to the countryside.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\u201cBut we couldn\u2019t get anywhere, so we gave ourselves up,\u201d she said, speaking to the AP in a tent she is staying in with her aunt. She said she is haunted by nightmares that keep her from sleeping.<\/p>\n

\nDaesh jailed her for a week after her first escape attempt, then turned her over to her captor who beat her savagely with cables and hoses.<\/p>\n

\nThe second time she tried to escape, her parents sent a paid smuggler to bring her to safety, but he was caught and gave up her name under Daesh interrogation. The man again punished Farman.<\/p>\n

\nAll the while, the militants were losing territory against advancing Syrian regime and Syrian Kurdish forces, and she moved from city to city with her abuser along the Euphrates River, until they were finally trapped in Baghouz.<\/p>\n

\n\u201cI got to see half of Syria,\u201d she said, ironically.<\/p>\n

\nFinally, the man asked if she would flee with him to Turkey.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\nShe refused, so he sold her to a smuggler for $10,000, money arranged by the Yazidi community in exile, to help her leave on her own.<\/p>\n

\nFarman made it out, but the man did not.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\nHe was caught by the US-backed Syrian Kurdish forces outside Baghouz, and has not been heard of since, she said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

DAHUK: Baseh Hammo was 38 when she was enslaved by militants of Daesh. Raped and abused, she was sold 17 times among members of the so-called \u201ccaliphate,\u201d and moved from city to city across a vast stretch of territory Daesh once controlled in northern Iraq and Syria. Her ordeal came to an end in January…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":34121,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-34120","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-middle_east_news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34120","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=34120"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34120\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/34121"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=34120"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=34120"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=34120"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}