Teen who set herself on fire in refugee camp to save herself from becoming an ISIS sex slave speaks out
Teenager has begun new life in Germany after being tormented by terrorists
A TEENAGE girl refugee deliberately set herself on fire, horrifically burning off her face because she was terrified ISIS thugs were coming to rape her.
The girl had been in the safety of a refugee camp in Iraq for two weeks when she imagined she heard the voices of Islamic State fighters outside her tent.
Petrified by the thought of again facing rape and abuse at their hands, 17-year-old Yasmin vowed to make herself undesirable.
The tragic teen doused herself in petrol before lighting a match. The flames burned her hair and face, peeling away her nose, lips and ears.
When she was found by German doctor Jan Ilhan Kizilhan last year she was physically disfigured and mentally so scarred that she had falsely thought her former captors were coming for her.
Now 18, Yasmin is one of 1,100 women, mainly of the Yazidi religious minority, who have escaped ISIS captivity and are in Germany for psychological treatment.
Recalling her ordeal today, Yasmin said: “Of course I want to go there and be safe, and be the old Yasmin again.”
It was on August 3, 2014, that ISIS fighters swept into the Sinjar region of northern Iraq, home to the majority of the world’s Yazidis. They rounded up the Yazidis into three groups: Young boys who were made to fight for ISIS, older males who were killed if they didn’t convert to Islam, and women and girls sold into slavery, like Yasmin.
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Tens of thousands of Yazidis fled to the mountains, where the militants surrounded them in the scorching summer heat.
The US, Iraq, Britain, France and Australia flew in water and other supplies, but many Yazidis died before they could be rescued.
Following the ISIS assault, “no free Yazidis remained in the Sinjar region,” a United Nations expert panel wrote. “The 400,000-strong community had all been displaced, captured or killed.”
An estimated 3,200 are still in ISIS captivity in Syria, where they were taken after being captured.
German doctor Jan Ilhan Kizilhan said: “It was an evil that I had never seen in my life. I’m experienced in trauma, I had already worked with patients from Rwanda, from Bosnia, but this was very different. If you have an 8-year-old girl in front of you and she’s saying she was sold eight times by IS and raped 100 times during 10 months, how can humankind be so evil?”
In the end, he decided upon 1,100 women and girls ranging in age today from four to 56.
The women are primarily treated in more than 20 clinics in Baden-Wuerttemberg, though 70 have been sent to Lower Saxony and another 30 to Schleswig Holstein. They are kept at undisclosed locations with extra security out of fears that IS sympathisers may try to target them even in Germany. The last chartered plane with the victims arrived in January.
About half the victims now in Germany need help just to stabilise. This means introducing them to the basics like going shopping, visiting doctors, and for children, going to school.
Among them is a woman whose four-year-old daughter was taken away by an IS fighter besotted with her blonde hair and blue eyes, who told her he would “marry” her when she was nine.
The mother escaped, but the daughter, now six, remains in the clutches of the extremists. The woman cries every time she sees a blonde-haired and blue-eyed girl on the street, Kizilhan says.
Another was taken by IS at age 16 with her family and watched as her father and two brothers were killed. She was sold as a sex slave to a fighter from Tunisia, and then resold another dozen times or so over the next year. Finally escaping, she walked barefoot and without food east across Syria to the Iraqi border.
Yasmin was 16 when she and her sister were separated from their family as they fled into the mountains, and spent seven days in IS captivity. Men were killed, and women and children taken, she says. After they escaped, she was still terrified and always crying.
She said: “Their voice was in my ears. I could hear their voice, I was so scared.
“I couldn’t take it anymore and this is what happened to me.”
Today she shares a modest single-family home with her parents, sister and two brothers. Her sister, a year older, won’t talk about what happened to her, and nor will most of the other women in the program. But for Yasmin, the desire for people to know outweighs her hesitance to dredge up horrific memories.
Yasmin wears loose-fitting clothing to protect her sensitive skin, and a machine at her bedside helps her breathe because of her damaged nose and airways. She hopes to eventually go to school, improve her German, learn English, and get a job involving computers. Yet she still fears the Islamic State, especially after two recent attacks in Germany claimed by the group.
She has somewhere between five and 15 surgeries ahead of her, Kizilhan says.
She dreams of going out in public again without turning heads, without children looking at her and crying.
“I want to be through the surgeries and be healthy again,” she said. “My family is here and I want to start a new life.”
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