Former Yazidi sex slave faints while confronting her IS rapist on Iraqi TV
Ashwaq Haji Hamid was 14 when the terror group seized her hometown, killing the males and abducting the girls
A 20-year old Yazidi woman who was kidnapped and repeatedly raped by a member of the Islamic State terror group confronted her tormentor on Iraqi television last Tuesday, sobbing and demanding an explanation for her suffering. Then she fainted.
Ashwaq Haji Hamid was 14 years old when IS group fighters seized Mount Sinjar in Iraq, the Yazidi ancestral heartland in Iraq, and went on to slaughter thousands of Yazidi men and boys and abduct girls to be used as sex slaves.
“I was approximately 14 years old when I was arrested by the terrorist ISIS gangs,” Hamid said in an interview with Iraqi station Al-Iraqiya translated into English by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI).
“We arrived in Syria at midnight. We were worried and didn’t know what would become of us and whether we would be killed or not,” she said.
“However, we took some comfort in being together — we would either live together or die together. But then they separated us from one another. There, in Syria, the IS terrorists separated all the girls above the age of nine from their relatives. We were taken to Mosul. We were 300 or 400 women in Mosul. We stayed there for three days and the IS men would come and see us. They would give us to one another as gifts or sell us for cheap.”
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She described how IS fighter Abu Humam “selected me and then he pulled me by the hair.
“I did not expect them to rape us because I was only 14. But they restrained us with iron handcuffs and violently raped us,” she continued. “He kept promising that he would let me go but then he would rape me three times a day and beat me three or four times a day. I was just a child and didn’t know anything.”
“Even if I was allowed to kill him, I would not want to get his filth on my hands, but I demand that the government do us right — it’s not just me, because who knows how many Yazidi girls he raped after me.”
In a separate interview intercut with that of his victim, Abu Humam told Al-Iraqiya that “she did not want it so I beat her to make her agree to the rape.”
Hamid was given the chance by authorities to confront the jailed Abu Humam and, in a confrontation broadcast across the country, she berated him as he stood in front of her in a yellow prison uniform, his head bowed and his hands bound in front of him.
“Abu Humam, look up,” she said.
“Why did you do this to me? Why? Because I’m Yazidi? I was 14 years old when you raped me. Look up. Do you have any feelings? Do you have any honor? I was 14 years old, as old as your daughter, your son, or your sister.”
“You destroyed my life,” she continued, sobbing. “You robbed me of all my dreams. I was once held by ISIS, by you, but now you will feel the meaning of torment, torture and loneliness. If you had any feelings, you would not have raped me when I was 14, the age of your son, the age of your daughter.”
It was at this point that she collapsed in a faint.
Of the world’s 1.5 million Yazidis, around 550,000 were living in the remote corners of northern Iraq before 2014.
The brutal assault launched by IS in August that year pushed around 360,000 Yazidis to flee to other parts of Iraq, including the Kurdish region, where they live in ramshackle displacement camps.
According to authorities, more than 6,400 Yazidis were abducted by IS and only half of them were able to flee or be rescued, while the fate of the others remains unknown. Another 100,000 fled abroad.
