The video below shows the moment when 34 Yazidis, a religious-minority group in Syria that has been decimated by the ongoing brutality, murder, and enslavement carried out by Islamic State forces, escape from the punishing regime, fleeing desperately to safety.
Filmed in northern Iraq for a Channel 4 documentary called Escape from ISIS, the film reveals the daring work carried out by an underground network that tries to help some of the estimated 3,000 Yazidi women and girls taken and kept as property and sexual slaves by their ISIS captors.
As Edward Watts, the director and producer of the shocking documentary told Moncrieff today, these women are regarded as subhuman by the men who rape and trade them on a whim, regarding them as pagan spoils of war.
“That’s actually based on a misunderstanding of their religion, but nonetheless, they’ve declared them as pagans,” Edward said. “ And that means, according again to their interpretation, that they can be enslaved as people were in medieval times. So that was the rationale behind taking them. They call them Sabya, which is a medieval term meaning ‘slaves captured in war’, and they’ve been distributed around ISIS territory on that basis.”
The existence for these women is a near-constant oppression; before the Syrian civil war that helped propel ISIS’ takeover of parts of the country and subsequent establishment of the state’s de facto capital in Raqqa, women in Syrian led a mostly Western life. The ultra conservative Islamic interpretation they now live under is very different. While women could once go to school and university, now they cannot even leave the house without the company of a husband, father or brother, and must cover themselves completely, even their eyes.
Worse still is the horrific abuse that Yazidi children endure.
“Pretty much every woman over the age of nine has been raped, ISIS say it’s legitimate to marry any girl over the age of nine and rape any girl over the age of nine. So they have all, pretty much, been subjected to a degree of sexual slavery,” Edward said.
“The young boys, the kids who are captured, have actually been taken to be soldiers,” he added.
“From the age of seven, any young boy is sent to a military-training camp, they’re indoctrinated into ISIS’ interpretation of Islam and trained in military tactics such as suicide bombing. But as you see in the documentary, even the old women suffer. We interviewed one old woman who had managed to get away, and she said she had been told by the ISIS fighters that even old women can be used, and she’d been used effectively as a blood bank for wounded ISIS fighters. So they’d taken blood from her, willy nilly, to help their wounded ISIS fighters in hospitals.”
The women are being helped by a dedicated group of resistance, an underground network operating within ISIS territory that Edward likens to the groups that helped Jews escape during the Nazi regime.
These men, a mix of individuals including farmers, shepherds, businessmen and the occasional cigarette smuggler risk their lives to lead the women out of the nightmarish conditions they are living in.
A young woman is carried to safety by a soldier in northern Iraq [Channel 4]
“It’s quite a complicated process,” Edward said, “But in very simple terms they identify where the women are being held. They make contact with them, they plan an escape route that circumvents ISIS checkpoints. And then one of these men goes in and guides the women and children to safety where they are met by the team that we were filming with.”
The initial escape is the easy part, but getting though ISIS territory can be extremely dangerous and exhausting.
“I mean the one story that we followed was a group of 24 that had to walk for two days to reach safety,” Edward told Sean.
“They couldn’t move around in the daylight, so they had to hide in fields in the rain. They had very young children with them. One young girl with them was only five. She lost her shoes when they were making their initial break from the house where they were being kept captive. And so she walked for two days barefoot through the mountains to reach safety.”
Escape from ISIS will be broadcast this evening, July 15th, at 10pm on Channel 4 as part of the Dispatches series. You can listen back to the complete interview with Edward Watts below:
