How this young Yazidi is bringing hope to IS victims

[Sally]

She has to be given a lot of credit for trying to help, but I think the international community should also pitch in and help these people.

Pari Ibrahim (C), the 27-year-old founder of the Free Yazidi Foundation, stands surrounded by Yezidi children in a refugee camp in Iraq. (photo by Free Yezidi Foundation)

How this young Yazidi is bringing hope to IS victims
AMSTERDAM — Pari Ibrahim, 27, was a regular law student in the Netherlands who had a job in a library until she received a phone call at 5 a.m. in August 2014 that would change her life forever. A family member from northern Iraq called to inform her that the self-proclaimed Islamic State (IS) had invaded Sinjar and had killed the men and kidnapped the women and children. “We are being massacred, we are heading for the mountains,” the family member said.

Summary⎙ Print Pari Ibrahim, a young Yazidi women living in the Netherlands, established the Free Yezidi Foundation to highlight the stories of victims of this Iraqi community at the hands of the Islamic State.
Author Brenda StoterPosted July 6, 2016
Ibrahim, who belongs to the Yazidi community, had fled Iraq with her parents in the 1990s and now lives in the Netherlands. After receiving the phone call, she frantically started searching the internet for information, but was not able to find news. Slowly it became clear what had happened in Sinjar. Thousands of Yazidi men had been killed or disappeared and 6,000 women and children had been enslaved by IS, including 19 females and 21 males who are Ibrahim’s relatives.

The women and girls, some as young as 9, were traded and sold as sex slaves, the boys were forcibly converted to Islam and were brainwashed to serve as fighters. The men were massacred and dumped in dozens of mass graves. To separate the boys from the men, IS militants looked at their armpits — if they had hair, they were killed, Ibrahim explained to Al-Monitor



Read more:

How this young Yazidi is bringing hope to IS victims

 

[waltky]

2 Yazidi women win Sakharov Prize for human rights...

2 Yazidi women who escaped IS group win human rights prize
October 27, 2016 — Two Yazidi women who escaped sexual enslavement by the Islamic State group and went on to become advocates for others have won the European Union's Sakharov Prize for human rights.

Guy Verhofstadt, the leader of the European Parliament's liberal ALDE group, said Thursday that Nadia Murad Basee and Lamiya Aji Bashar are "inspirational women who have shown incredible bravery and humanity in the face of despicable brutality. I am proud that they have been awarded the 2016 Sakharov Prize." Parliamentarian Beatriz Becerra Basterrechea, who backed their nominations, said the prize is "a recognition of Nadia's and Lamiya's fight throughout their life. Both have impressively overcome the brutal sexual slavery they were exposed to by jihadist terrorists and become an example for all of us."

Murad has become a spokeswoman for other women abused by IS. In December, she told the U.N. Security Council how she and thousands of other Yazidi women and girls were abducted, held in captivity and repeatedly raped after the Iraqi area of Sinjar fell to Islamic State militants in August 2014. She escaped after three months in captivity. Bashar tried to flee four times before finally escaping this past March. As fighters pursued her, a land mine exploded, killing the two people she was with and leaving her scarred and unable to see out of her right eye. Still, she said, she considered herself among the lucky.

"Even if I had lost both eyes, it would have been worth it, because I have survived them," she told The Associated Press in an interview earlier this year in her uncle's home in the northern Iraqi town of Baadre. The prize comes as Iraqi forces backed by the U.S. are waging an offensive aimed at retaking the northern city Mosul, the Islamic State group's last major holding in Iraq. Hundreds of Yazidi women and girls are still captives of IS militants in Iraq and Syria. The Yazidi minority follows an ancient religion that IS and other Muslim hard-liners consider heretical.

The award, named after Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov, was created in 1988 to honor individuals or groups who defend human rights and fundamental freedoms. Last year's winner was Saudi blogger Raif Badawi. Other former winners include Nelson Mandela of South Africa and Aung San Suu Kyi from Myanmar. Among the finalists this year were the Crimean Tatars and a former Turkish newspaper editor.

2 Yazidi women who escaped IS group win human rights prize