MAQLUBA, iraq — The young Yazidi girl rocked apprehensively as she described the ordeal: She was snatched from her home by militants in Iraq, then sold as a slave in Syria before finally escaping to Turkey.
The 15-year-old is now with what is left of her family — two of her brothers and some more distant relatives — living in a makeshift roadside shelter in this tiny village in northern Iraq, along with other families shattered by the onslaught from the Islamic State terrorists.
Her two sisters remain in the terrorists’ hands. Her father, other brothers and other male relatives have vanished, their fates unknown.
The girl was among hundreds of women and girls from the Yazidi religious minority captured by the Islamic State fighters in early August when the terrorists overran her hometown of Sinjar in northwestern Iraq.
Hundreds were killed in the attack, and tens of thousands fled for their lives, most to the Kurdish-held parts of northern Iraq.
Iraq’s Human Rights Ministry said hundreds of women were abducted by the terrorists, who consider the Yazidis a heretical sect.
The Associated Press spoke to the girl and several other young women who escaped captivity by the Islamic State group. While specifics of their stories could not be independently confirmed, they reflected circumstances reported by the United Nations last month.
For weeks after being snatched from Sinjar, the 15-year-old girl and two of her sisters were shifted from one place to another, she said. The AP does not identify victims of abuse.
First, she said, she and other girls were taken to the town of Tal Afar, where she was kept in the Badosh Prison. When U.S. airstrikes began around the town, the militants took her and many other girls with them to the Islamic State group’s biggest stronghold, Mosul.
From the city of Mosul, she and her sisters were taken to the terrorists’ de facto capital, the Syrian city of Raqqa. There they were held in a house with other abducted girls. “They took girls to Syria to sell them,” she said. “I was sold in Syria.”
In Raqqa, she said, she was first married off to a Palestinian man. She claims she shot him. She fled, but she had nowhere to run. So she went to the only place she knew, she said — the house where she was first held with the other girls in Raqqa.
There, the militants did not recognize her and sold her off again — for $1,000 to a Saudi fighter, she said.
“He told me, ‘I’m going to change your name to Abeer, so your mother doesn’t recognize you,’ ” she said. “You’ll become Muslim, then I will marry you.”
She saw the terrorists at times take a powdered drug. So she poured it into tea she served to the Saudi and the other men, causing them to fall asleep. Then she fled.
She found a man who would drive her to Turkey to meet her brother. Her brother borrowed $2,000 from friends to pay a smuggler to get them back to Iraq.
