KHANKE, Kurdistan Region - They put fences and walls around them, and made them into prison camps. ISIS, or the Islamic State, has used villages that were earlier emptied when their frightened inhabitants fled the Islamic radicals to imprison hundreds of Yezidi women and children.
Photographs do not exist of this latest disclosure of ISIS practices, but families who escaped from the camps are able to testify about their presence and locations. A portion of the hundreds of children that ISIS kidnapped are also living in those camps.
Habib Khalesh Jazai, 14, and Faraz Hashem Jazai, 12, are two cousins who recently escaped. They are now living in a house in the Kurdish Yezidi village of Khanke, provided for them by the authorities in Iraqi Kurdistan.
There was no food or water, the boys recall about the camp where they were forced to spend a couple of months in the heat of the Iraqi summer. “We all had fleas and everybody was smelling so badly,” says Faraz, as he scratches himself in disgust.
The boys were with the women and children ISIS kidnapped in August 2014 from the Yezidi village of Kocho, after killing all of its men and leaving them in a nearby ditch. “ Daesh said they would take us to the mountains, but they lied,” says Habib, using the local acronym for the group.
Women and children were separated, and the cousins eventually ended up with some 45 others in a school in Talafar, a town near the self-proclaimed ISIS capital of Mosul. There, they stayed for 17 days, with very little food and being awakened at the first call for prayer every morning to learn the Quran.
“The teacher made us repeat every word. If we did not do well he would beat us with a stick,” Habib says. “It was too difficult and in Arabic, and we only know Kurdish. All we wanted to do was sleep.”
It is known that ISIS indoctrinates young captives to become Muslims; pictures on the Internet have shown that some of them have also been turned into young ISIS fighters. But not the two cousins, who refused to obey their teachers, even though they were threatened and beaten.
Eventually the endless crying of the kids made their tutors first split them up in an older and younger group, and then choose only those who did well to continue the Quran lessons.
The cousins were not chosen. To their surprise and joy they were re-joined with their mothers and some of their female relatives. “My mother fell to the ground when she saw me,” says Habib softly.
Habib’s family was taken back to Kocho, which had since been looted and fenced in. Faraz and his relatives went to a village near Talafar that had previously been home to Shiite Turkmens and was also changed into a prison.
ISIS has created at least three prison camps like these next to Kocho in the Shingal region and two near Talafar, says the Kurdish official in charge of follow up on the fate of kidnapped Yezidis, Noori Abdulrahman. He thinks ISIS uses the camps to put still more pressure on people to convert. “And at the same time they want to exchange some of them for prisoners in our hands,” he says.
The situation in the camps is known to be very bad. “The movement of the people there has been very limited. Whenever we could reach them, we would help.” That meant that more than 70 people were rescued in some way from there.
The looted houses were empty and there was no water and no hygiene, as the female family members of the cousins in the Khanke house recount. “We were given rice that was infested with insects. The small kids were so hungry that they ate their own skin. We all had infections and fleas. There was no sanitation at all for our monthly periods.”
Both families escaped: Habib’s by using a water channel to get to the other side of the fence and Faraz’s by cutting a hole through the barrier. They walked for nights, sleeping in the daytime and hiding at night when they saw cars coming. Eventually, they found help from Sunnis who had remained in the region. They then contacted a Yezidi organization in the Kurdish city of Duhok that paid for their transport to Iraqi Kurdistan.
Former Iraqi parliament member Amina Said leads this organization, known as “the commission for helping those who escape from daesh.” She puts the number of Yezidis who escaped from ISIS at around 470, of whom 142 are children. “All the children that escaped came with their families,” she says. They are mainly from the camps. “Kids cannot do it alone.”
The contact with some 400 children who have been put in the ISIS indoctrination program is lost, and there is little hope they will be found. But since the Kurdish Peshmerga started an offensive in Shingal, hope has risen that the camps will be liberated too, ending a desperate situation for the imprisoned women and children.
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