Disir
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- Sep 30, 2011
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RAQQA, Syria: She was trafficked into Raqqa as a sex slave by Daesh but managed to escape. Now Yazidi fighter Heza is back to avenge the horrors she and thousands of others suffered.
Her hair tucked under a tightly wrapped forest green shawl embroidered with flowers, Heza says battling Daesh in its Syrian bastion has helped relieve some of her trauma.
“When I started fighting, I lifted some of the worries from my heart,” she says, surrounded by fellow Yazidi militia women in Raqqa’s eastern Al-Meshleb district.
“But it will be full of revenge until all the women are freed.”
She and her two sisters were among thousands of women and girls from the Kurdish-speaking Yazidi minority taken hostage by Daesh as it swept into Iraq’s Sinjar region in August 2014.
The women were sold and traded across the jihadists’ self-proclaimed “caliphate” in Syria and Iraq. Around 3,000 are believed to remain in captivity, including one of Heza’s sisters.
“When the Yazidi genocide happened, Daesh snatched up the women and girls. I was one of them,” Heza recounts.
The UN has qualified the massacres Daesh carried out against the Yazidis during the Sinjar attack as genocide.
Daesh separated Yazidi females from the men in Sinjar, bringing the women and girls into Raqqa.
“They took us like sheep. They chased us and humiliated us in these very streets,” Heza said, gesturing to a row of heavily damaged homes in Al-Meshleb.
The eastern district was the first neighborhood captured from Daesh by the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces, a Kurdish-Arab alliance, in their months-long offensive to seize the jihadist bastion.
SDF officials said that their forces had already rescued several female Yazidi captives, including a 10-year-old girl, since they entered Raqqa city in June.
Over the course of her 10-month captivity in Raqqa, Heza was bought by five different Daesh fighters.
Sold by Daesh in Raqqa, Yazidi female fighters back for revenge
An interesting article on the YPS.
Her hair tucked under a tightly wrapped forest green shawl embroidered with flowers, Heza says battling Daesh in its Syrian bastion has helped relieve some of her trauma.
“When I started fighting, I lifted some of the worries from my heart,” she says, surrounded by fellow Yazidi militia women in Raqqa’s eastern Al-Meshleb district.
“But it will be full of revenge until all the women are freed.”
She and her two sisters were among thousands of women and girls from the Kurdish-speaking Yazidi minority taken hostage by Daesh as it swept into Iraq’s Sinjar region in August 2014.
The women were sold and traded across the jihadists’ self-proclaimed “caliphate” in Syria and Iraq. Around 3,000 are believed to remain in captivity, including one of Heza’s sisters.
“When the Yazidi genocide happened, Daesh snatched up the women and girls. I was one of them,” Heza recounts.
The UN has qualified the massacres Daesh carried out against the Yazidis during the Sinjar attack as genocide.
Daesh separated Yazidi females from the men in Sinjar, bringing the women and girls into Raqqa.
“They took us like sheep. They chased us and humiliated us in these very streets,” Heza said, gesturing to a row of heavily damaged homes in Al-Meshleb.
The eastern district was the first neighborhood captured from Daesh by the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces, a Kurdish-Arab alliance, in their months-long offensive to seize the jihadist bastion.
SDF officials said that their forces had already rescued several female Yazidi captives, including a 10-year-old girl, since they entered Raqqa city in June.
Over the course of her 10-month captivity in Raqqa, Heza was bought by five different Daesh fighters.
Sold by Daesh in Raqqa, Yazidi female fighters back for revenge
An interesting article on the YPS.
