Isis sex slave kidnapped aged 11 is rescued a decade later thanks to TikTok video
Seydou was just 11 when she was kidnapped by Islamic State fighters who stormed her home area of Sinjar in northern Iraq in August 2014, killing men and abducting thousands of young women and girls.
Taken to a slave market in Mosul, she was traded between different Isis fighters and repeatedly raped. After a year she was moved to the Syrian city of Raqqa where she was married off to her third captor, a 24-year-old Palestinian from Gaza who she says also belonged to Hamas.
“He told me that I had to sleep with him,” she said in an interview with Kurdish TV channel Rudaw. “On the third day, he went to a pharmacy and bought a drug that numbs part of the body. He gave me the drug and I cried.
”The following year she gave birth to a boy, then some time later a daughter.
In late 2018 her captor was killed in fighting for the Islamic State, which was driven out of its last stronghold by Kurdish forces backed by a US-led coalition. Seydou was transferred to Al-Hawl, a grim camp for Isis wives in the desert of northeast Syria where as many as 100 Yazidi women still remain.
Her captor’s brother was also in Isis and in 2020 he arranged to get her and the children out through Turkey to Egypt and through tunnels to Gaza. Desperate to escape the camp, and thinking her own family dead, she agreed.
But once in Rafah she says the family were so abusive, forcing her to clean and cook and regularly beating her, that at one point she took an overdose, ending up in hospital.
Eventually, last September, she made the TikTok video asking someone to contact Nadia Murad, the Nobel peace prizewinning Yazidi activist. “HELP me,” she pleaded. “I’m really tired, it’s not just their men, their women and children also harass me … They might assault me, KILL me … it’s really overwhelming.
”It was picked up by a Kurdish TV channel, which interviewed her. The story was seen by her mother who had long assumed her daughter was dead.
What this woman went through is horrifying, but it is not out of the ordinary for what Yazidi women have gone through over the past decade or more.
www.npr.org/series/735498202/life-after-isis-the-struggle-and-survival-of-yazidis
www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/yazidis-decade-after-isis-genocidal-campaign/
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yazidi_genocide#Violence_against_Yazidi_women_and_girls
