One of them at the clinic last week is named Sahira (Mr. Kizilhan asked that I use only the first names of his patients). She pulls out her smartphone and scrolls through photos until she finds the right one. It shows a smiling baby girl in polka-dot pajamas playing with a big pink ball. When ISIS in August 2014 overran the Yazidi stronghold of Sinjar, the 26-year-old Sahira and her three children, including Lozin, the 2-year-old in the photograph, were enslaved and transferred to the caliphate’s capital in Raqqa, Syria.
There, she says, they became the property of an ISIS commander named Abu Jihad, who was bent on Arabizing and Islamizing Sahira’s children. (The Yazidis are a Kurdish minority whose faith blends elements of Christianity and Islam with the region’s pre-Islamic religions.) After Lozin repeatedly failed to say Islamic prayers correctly, Abu Jihad locked the toddler inside a small box in the scorching heat. No one was allowed near the box for seven days.
After the box was finally unlocked, her mother says, Lozin was probably already close to death, but then the ISIS commander punched her in the small of her back, finishing off the baby before handing her over. Sahira says that when she protested, Abu Jihad lifted her daughter’s body high above his head and dropped her on the floor, and said: “The Yazidis are not believers. We can do anything we want with you.”
Sahira’s ordeal wasn’t over. For months she had resisted Abu Jihad’s attempts to rape her—until he raised the stakes by tying her 4-year-old son to a car and threatening to drag him to his death. She relented, and endured what followed. Eventually, Sahira’s family secured her and her two surviving children’s release by buying them back from ISIS.
How do you begin to heal scars like this? Mr. Kizilhan’s solution is to bring 1,000 of the severest cases to Baden-Württemberg, in southwest Germany, for a period of intensive treatment. The €95 million ($100 million) “preventative asylum” project is funded by the Baden-Württemberg state government. For Mr. Kizilhan, himself a Turkish-born Yazidi who immigrated to Germany at age 6, it’s personal. Islamic State doesn’t see Yazidis like him as human.
“As a scientist you learn that ideology can blind people,” he says. “In the morning they rape children, and at night when they go home they’re loving fathers and husbands.” To treat ISIS as just another al Qaeda-style terror group, he warns, is to ignore the “Nazi-like,” genocidal evolution of its Islamist worldview.
On each of his visits to Iraqi Kurdistan, Mr. Kizilhan interviews dozens of women to identify those most in need of evacuation. Most are Yazidis and Christians, with smaller numbers of Shiite Muslims. He is now close to the program’s head-count limit, forcing him to make wrenching decisions as the women take him on a tour of the depths of Islamic State depravity.
For the ISIS jihadists, slavery and the attendant sexual violence are intended to shatter non-Muslim societies. It is a family enterprise, with fighters’ female siblings and legitimate wives helping control slaves. Najaa, 24, and her 4-year-old niece spent nine months in the hands of ISIS. She was sold three times by fighters, all of whom “married” her (some Yazidi women use the word to avoid saying “rape”).
The worst part of her experience, she says, was watching helplessly as her ISIS “family” burned her niece’s hands and tied her in stress positions for speaking Kurdish instead of Arabic, or failing to recite Quranic passages. Najaa and her niece escaped Raqqa one day while her captor was out of the house. “I thought many times that I should commit suicide,” she tells Mr. Kizilhan. “But the only reason I didn’t was because I had to protect this girl.”
Today Najaa has fewer suicidal thoughts, but she says she “doesn’t believe in any human being.” Like many of Mr. Kizilhan’s patients, she has lost the trust that binds women to the world. Most experience episodes in which they lose contact with the present tense and imagine they are back in captivity. They lose hair, can’t concentrate and suffer nightmares.
Some fighters develop steady “relationships” with their slaves. Hadya, an 18-year-old Yazidi beauty, spent 15 months with an emir, or “prince,” and still has relatives in captivity. During the first few months the emir imprisoned her and repeatedly punched her in the head. Later he came to trust her and even took her on family outings. After she cut her wrists in an attempt to commit suicide, the emir’s sister took strict charge of his prized possession. Eventually she was bought back by her family for $15,000.
Islamic State’s cruelty is astonishing. So is the courage of the women who have faced it. The story of life under ISIS is also the story of the resilience of the human spirit. “I get strength from the women and girls,” Mr. Kizilhan says. “They tell you about horrific things, but they are still able to have perspective. This kind of trauma will always be part of your life. But the key is to not forget that it is not your whole life.”
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By Sohrab Ahmari, a Journal editorial writer based in London. http://www.wsj.com/articles/helping-the-escaped-slaves-of-isis-1448325989?mod=djemMER
Photo: At this clinic in Iraq’s Kurdish north, women who have suffered unspeakable cruelty come for help.