An Islamic State slave lives to tell the tale

Lamiya, a Yazidi from Iraq, recalls her horrific captivity, and hopes for justice

Lamiya Aji Bashar

Lamiya Aji Bashar was 15 when she was abducted from her village in Iraq and forced into slavery by the Islamic State (IS). That was on August 3, 2014.

For the next 20 months, she was taken across various places in Syria and Iraq, tortured and abused till she managed to escape in April 2016.

Ms. Bashar is one of the several women and girls of the Yazidi community, a religious minority in Iraq, enslaved and subjected to heinous physical and sexual assaults by IS men in the self-declared Islamic Caliphate across Iraq and Syria.

Ms. Bashar has been campaigning against the atrocities on the Yazidi community and the continued enslavement of women and children by the IS.

On Monday, addressing the Asian Security Conference organised by the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses here, she recounted the horror she went through, and hoped the IS would be punished.

Massacre in the village

Narrating the horror in her village, Kocho, near Sinjar, Ms. Bashar said that immediately after the attack on the village, IS fighters rounded up and killed all the men and captured the women and children. Later, the older women were separated and killed. Nearly 400 men and 80 women were killed. “They took me and my sister to Mosul. Then one fighter from Saudi Arabia brought me and my sister. He raped us repeatedly and after two days brought us to the same place,” Ms. Bashar said.

Later, she was separated from her sister and was sold and resold several times and taken to Syria. She even attempted suicide by cutting her veins.

Ms. Bashar remembered coming across an Indian who made bombs and suicide vests. He was there to blow himself up. In April 2016, one of her uncles paid $7,500 to some smugglers to get her freed.

She set out with two other girls to escape into the Kurdish controlled territory when tragedy struck.

One of the girls stepped on a land mine. In the explosion, Ms. Bashar nearly lost one eye while the other two girls were killed.

In December, she got the annual Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought from the European Parliament.