Young girls in Islamic State captivity committing suicide to avoid sex slavery: reports
24 Dec 2014
Victims who managed to escape the Islamic State captivity told Amnesty International that many girls were committing suicide after losing hope that they would ever be rescued, according to reports yesterday.
Many Yazidi women, captured by ISIS, were committing suicide by either strangulating themselves with their scarves or by cutting their wrists, say reports.
After abducting several women and children from Iraq's Yazidi minority the militants had forced them into sexual slavery.
According one of the girls who escaped captivity, a 19-year-old girl named Jilan committed suicide after she felt that she would be raped. She said one day they were given clothes that looked like dance costumes and were told to bathe and wear those clothes. She added Jilan killed herself in the bathroom by cutting her wrists and hanging herself. Amnesty quoted her as saying, she was very beautiful.
In another incident involving two girls who attempted to escape forced marriage, by tying scarves around their necks. They tried to pull away from each other as hard as they could, until one fainted. The girl who fainted could not speak for several days, according to Amnesty.
Meanwhile, AP reported that over the past week, Iraqi Kurdish peshmerga fighters had descended Mount Sinjar mountain, battling to liberate the town of Sinjar, a tiny desert community in northern Iraq that had been taken by gunmen who massacred and enslaved hundreds of its residents.
An Associated Press correspondent who was with the Kurds, reported that the fighting, which was still going on, had been fierce. One day this week, a Chevy Tahoe rushed up to a Kurdish position on the edge of town carrying the body of a fellow Kurdish fighters hit by a militant sniper's bullet.
The driver said that the name of the dead man was not known, as the body the fighters started draping the body with a flag of Iraqi Kurdistan.
He said the Islamic State militants fought like Rambo and had nothing to lose, as he pointed to a chink in his flak jacket where he had been shot by the same sniper. He said the chink had saved his life.
