Evil, pure evil

Iraqi Woman Tells Of Gang Rape Ordeal At Hands Of ISIL

Source:  www.inquisitr.com

By Ruth Pollard, Sept. 17, 2014, Smh.com.au

Dohuk, northern Iraq: Kamal unwraps a carefully folded piece of paper divided into two columns of neatly written names.

One column lists the 23 family members, mostly women and girls, who were taken by Islamic State militants last month when they stormed through a series of Yazidi villages in the north of Iraq on a rampage that left hundreds, if not thousands, dead.

The other column: the 17 relatives killed by the insurgents as they tried to escape to Mount Sinjar.

We are in a public school sheltering internally displaced people in the back streets of the northern Kurdish city of Dohuk to meet his cousin, a young woman who only the day before arrived at this shelter after escaping IS militants.

They held Kamal's cousin and 21 other young women captive for more than a month.

Zeitoun enters the classroom that is now home to more than a dozen people, mattresses and blankets piled almost to the ceiling, and sits beside me.

Upright, strong and articulate, the 23-year-old describes the moment that the militants captured her at a farmhouse she had fled to on the way to Mount Sinjar as IS fighters took over village after village. They separated their prisoners – men from women, women from girls.

"They killed the men, my father and seven others, right in front of my eyes and then took some other women into a school, threw fuel over them and planned to burn them," she says.

Across the room from us sit three of those women. One is weeping quietly – her daughter is still missing and she is moving between relief over Zeitoun's survival and grief that her daughter is not with her.

Zeitoun gestures to them. "They were the ones doused in petrol and Da'esh [IS] were going to set them alight. It is only that there was an air strike that made them run away, so they lived."

A woman enters the classroom to visit, her face erupting in relief and joy as she sees Zeitoun, one more who survived what everyone feared was certain death. If she kisses her once, she kisses her dozens of times, holding her face in disbelief and crying as she drinks in the idea that she is safe.

Zeitoun continues her story.

"They put us in three cars – 22 girls and women – and took us to the village of Baaj, then on to Mosul [a city that has been under the control of the Islamic State since June 10].

"Many things happened to us in the 11 days we were in Mosul," she says quietly. "You know why they had us – they were giving us to each other, passing us between themselves for sex."

Suddenly they were on the move again – Zeitoun was taken back to Baaj and her sister-in-law to Tal Afar. After two days she was moved again via minibus to another village called Tal Banat.

Along with the sexual violence there was also the beatings. Her wrists were tied together and she pulls down her bottom lip to reveal a deep cut that has yet to heal – the last time she was punched in the face for trying to resist an IS militant.

"Sometimes two men were hitting me at once and even though I was badly injured they would have sex with me every night, handing me from one man to the next.

"We were desperate to wash our faces, to clean the blood, but they would pour gasoline into the water and force us to use that," she says.

Read the full story:  www.smh.com.au

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