Moving Forward
Few women outside Erbil have the luxury of forgetting the past, but most ar e trying. When approximately 5000 women from Iraq and Syria’s Yazidi community were abducted by ISIS and forced into sex slavery in August 2014, their prospects looked bleak—and the reality proved even worse. “I tried to kill myself three times but it never worked,” says Sausan, 18, who was caught by the extremists while trying to flee to the mountains on the border of Syria, and only escaped her captors in March this year. “I was taken to a huge hall in Mosul where the prettiest girls were picked out first and auctioned off to the terrorists, before the rest of us were handed over to whichever man asked first.” Sausan was presented to a man “maybe in his 50s” as his wife, but was never told his name. “For two years he would drug me and rape me, while keeping me locked up in a small room,” she remembers. “I had a small memory card with some pop songs that I’d had in my pocket when they kidnapped me, and the man bought me an MP3 player so that I could listen to an audiobook of the Qur’an. Whenever he left the room, I’d switch the cards and try to escape through the music.” When she finally managed to get away with the help of a smuggler, she worked with a counselor from a local NGO to stop reliving her experiences. “But every time I hear one of those songs come on the radio, it’s like I’m transported back in time.”
Her story isn’t an anomaly. Jihan Mustafa Ibrahim, Executive Director of the Women’s Rehabilitation Organisation, a UNICEF-funded, Dohuk-based NGO, focused on supporting female survivors of abuse at the hands of ISIS fighters, says that she continues to hear of atrocities committed by the extremists. “And the liberation of Mosul doesn’t mean the end of ISIS, or the end of conflict in this country,” she says. “There are many, many sleeper cells across the city, thousands of men and women are still missing, and Tal Afar is still under Islamist control. Plus Kurdistan is holding an independence referendum at the end of September, so who knows what the results will do to the stability of the region. It’s a very difficult time for people—it doesn’t matter if you live in Erbil or Mosul or anywhere in between. I don’t think anyone feels 100 per cent sure about the next few months.”
Back in Hajj Ali, Nazhad points the barrel of her rifle and fires a warning shot at the sky. As the sound reverberates over the fields below, her grandchildren pull at her sleeves and beg for a go on the gun. “Since we started the night watch, there haven’t been any attacks,” she explains on her way back down the steps. “Our sons say that they would come back and protect us if anything happened again. But when you live in Iraq, you have to be prepared for anything. You never know what to expect.”