A tearful homecoming for an abducted Yazidi woman
Khalaf returns to schoolhouse where Daesh kept women as sex slaves
Farida Khalaf somehow kept her composure as she returned to her devastated home village in northern Iraq for the first time in four years — until she entered the schoolhouse.
That was where Daesh terrorists had separated her and other Yazidi women from their male relatives, selling the women into sexual slavery and sending the men to their deaths.
Today, the walls are covered with the portraits of those who were killed. She fell to her knees and sobbed uncontrollably.
Khalaf was just 18 years old when she was captured and sold into slavery, and endured four months of rape, torture and beatings until she managed to escape.
She later wrote about her experiences in The Girl Who Beat Isis: My Story, published in 2016.
On Tuesday she returned to her village of Kocho for the first time since she was captured, passing rows of homes and buildings destroyed in the battle to retake the village in 2015.
“It was very difficult for me to think that I would come back to Kocho again,” Khalaf said later, as she stood in an empty classroom looking at the photos of the dead.
“I will never forget the day Daesh came and they gathered us in the school and separated us from our families, that will never leave my mind,” she said.
Khalaf was taken to the schoolhouse and separated from her father and older brother, who were killed.
In the book, co-written with the German journalist Andrea Hoffmann, she describes how they were bought and sold like cattle. She fought back those who raped her and tried to kill herself.
She eventually escaped when her “owner” left the door to her room unlocked, and her mother escaped five months later. ■