Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
My wife was also taken but I had her captor killed and rescued her
ISIS SEX SLAVE NADIA MURAD’S HERO BROTHER...
The photograph is grainy but their joy is clear – a couple embrace, their faces buried deep in the feel and smell of each other, lost in a rush of relief and love.
Few happy stories have emerged from devastated Mosul in northern Iraq since its liberation from Islamic State a year ago.
But the joyful reunion of Huzni Murad Pissi and his wife Jilan is one of them.
Four years ago this month, Jilan was among 5,000 Yazidi women kidnapped in their ancient homeland of Sinjar by the jihadis as they seized swathes of the country, destroying village after village.
Thousands of Yazidis, a religious minority despised by IS, were massacred.
Their plight captured global attention when the 50,000 who escaped fled up Sinjar’s mountain where they remained trapped, prompting US air strikes.
But this did not help women like Jilan, who were taken to Mosul and forced into brutal physical and sexual slavery.
Many would not escape until liberation and thousands remain in captivity or are still missing today. But Huzni and Jilan had other ideas and the events leading to her escape read like a film script.
During her 30-month incarceration, Jilan managed to steal a mobile phone and risked punishment by gang rape or even execution by contacting her husband in the vain hope he had survived.
Through snatched, hushed conversations she was able to reveal her location, giving Huzni, now 37, the opportunity to plan an extraordinary rescue. Improbably, he hired a hitman to kill her captor before finally smuggling his wife out of Mosul, and back into his arms.
Smiling in their portable home in a remote refugee camp in northern Iraq, he explains: “It was not difficult to begin again. I was so happy, so eager, I just wanted to start over with my wife.”
Beside him, Jilan, 26, shields her face for our photographs, clearly still traumatised.
But clutching their now six-month-old daughter Raoah, her happiness is clear as she adds: “I had lost hope, but he told me, ‘You will come back, and you will be loved, and I will be here for you’.”
There is another reason why this couple’s tale is extraordinary: the fact it has remained untold while Huzni’s little sister’s has been widely reported.
She is 25-year-old Nadia Murad, who was also held as a sex slave in Mosul.
Since her own escape, she has become world famous through her campaign for IS’S crime against the Yazidis to be recognised as genocide, with the support of human rights lawyer Amal Clooney.
Earlier this week we revealed Nadia has also found happiness, becoming engaged to fellow activist Abid Shamdeen.
There are few braver than his little sister, believes Huzni as he stands proudly before his collection of her press photographs.
Islamic State seized the Murads’ village of Kocho on August 3, 2014. Huzni, a policeman, had gone to work. Unable to get home, he fled to Mount Sinjar, hoping against hope his family would too. But only two brothers made it.
His wife, mother, Nadia, their other two sisters and six brothers were herded to the village school. Those six brothers were among the 300 men massacred.
Their mother was also killed. It was perhaps a blessing their father died years before and never witnessed it.
The unmarried women were taken to Mosul – childless Jilan among them.
There, they were forced into a basement and held for 20 days as IS men arrived to pick slaves. Jilan recalls Nadia’s bravery.
“She was always the one to fight back,” Jilan says. “They would hit her, but she would turn the other cheek and they would hit her there too.”
“I was not brave,” she adds, modestly. “I was so afraid.” Yet there was clearly a quiet courage within Jilan, who was selected by a “tall, fat man”. While Nadia escaped after three months, Jilan would be held until December 2016. For the first year she was kept alone with the brute.
She was then taken to live with his resentful wife and children, yet he continued to rape her. He would regularly beat her – especially when she resisted. She shows me her leg, still swollen, and recalls: “He beat me with a metal pole. My body was completely bruised.”
Then, quietly, she adds: “I tried to say no.” Finding an unattended phone was a godsend – but by taking it she risked her life. Again, that quiet courage rose. She had
no idea her husband was alive and when he answered, tears streamed down her face. “We were crying and crying, then laughing, then crying. We never thought we would see each other again.”
Learning his wife was being abused was almost impossible for Huzni to live with.
But he knew his love was unchanged
and he must free her. “I had to convince her she would come back and I would be here for her,” he says.
Huzni had contacts in Mosul and persuaded a friend to help. At huge risk, they arranged for a hitman to track Jilan’s captor and kill him by crashing into his car.
Of course it was far from easy – not least because Jilan was often with him.
But one day he was alone.
“Yes, they actually killed him,” Huzni repeats, his disbelief audible.
Even then Jilan’s situation was perilous. But two weeks later there was an opportunity for Huzni’s friend to swoop.
“They got her to a checkpoint and handed her to the Iraq army,” he explains, smiling broadly again. Later, we are shown the couple’s wedding video on a phone, their whole village dancing. Chillingly, we are told: “Eighty per cent of those people are now dead.”
For the Yazidis who survived, grief still dominates their lives. Sinjar is devastated so they cannot return home.
Thousands live in refugee camps; only lucky ones, like Nadia, claimed asylum abroad. She now lives in Germany.
Jilan’s brother and father are missing. Nadia and Huzni have a nephew, sister-inlaw and niece still missing and two nieces killed. Jilan and hundreds more women receive counselling for their trauma.
But to meet the beaming couple is confirmation happiness is achievable.
The United Nations Population Fund provides crucial psychological support to Yazidi women. For information and to find out how to donate, visit iraq.unfpa.org
We were crying and laughing. We never thought we’d see each other again JILAN ON FIRST PHONE CALL TO HUSBAND DURING CAPTIVITY