Freed Yazidi female fighters vow revenge
raqqa (Syria) — She was trafficked into Raqqa as a sex slave by the Daesh group but managed to escape. Now Yazidi fighter Heza is back to avenge the horrors she and thousands of others suffered.
Her hair tucked under a tightly wrapped forest green shawl embroidered with flowers, Heza says battling Daesh in its Syrian bastion has helped relieve some of her trauma.
“When I started fighting, I lifted some of the worries from my heart,” she says, surrounded by fellow Yazidi militia women in Raqqa’s eastern Al Meshleb district.
“But it will be full of revenge until all the women are freed.”
She and her two sisters were among thousands of women and girls from the Kurdish-speaking Yazidi minority taken hostage by Daesh as it swept into Iraq’s Sinjar region in August 2014.
“When the Yazidi genocide happened, Daesh snatched up the women and girls. I was one of them,” Heza recounts.
Daesh separated Yazidi females from the men in Sinjar, bringing the women and girls into Raqqa.
Over the course of her 10-month captivity in Raqqa, Heza was bought by five different Daesh fighters.
The young fighter says she prefers not to detail the abuses she suffered. But in an indication of the extent of her trauma, Heza — whose name means “strength” in Kurdish — says she tried to commit suicide several times.
Finally, in May 2015, she escaped from the home where she was being held to a nearby market, and she found a Syrian Kurdish family who smuggled her out of the city.
She travelled around 400km across war-ravaged northeast Syria back into Iraq to join the Shengal Women’s Units (YPS).
The YPS — named after the Kurdish word for Sinjar — is a part of the US-backed SDF.
Heza underwent intensive weapons training, and when the SDF announced its fight for Raqqa in November 2016, she and other YPS fighters were ready.
“When the Raqqa offensive began, I wanted to take part in it for all the Yazidi girls who were sold here in these streets,” she says.
“My goal is to free them, to avenge them.” — AFP