DUHOK, Kurdistan Region – Saifadin Shingali and Mahmoud Mardini, two Muslims from Shingal who have made it their business to free captured Yezidis from the clutches of the Islamic State (ISIS), anxiously await the latest arrivals: 17 Yezidi women moved to safe houses in the Syrian city of Raqqa and expected in Duhok within days.
“It has not arrived?” one of them barks into a phone, couching his language to sound like he is enquiring about a package as he speaks to a smuggler on the other end. “Okay, but it will arrive tomorrow?” he asks about the awaited Yezidis.
Working out of an office in a Duhok shopping mall owned by Shingali, and supported financially by the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), they pay smugglers $4,000 for their services.
Together, the pair has established SAIFO, the Organization for Saving Yezidi Kurds, which over the last two months has arranged for the release of dozens of Yezidi Kurds from ISIS hands.
In an interview with Rudaw last month Nuri Osman, special coordinator for Yezidi refugees in the KRG, revealed that 234 Yezidis had been freed from ISIS, 150 of them females, and many as young as 12.
He said the KRG had helped either through facilitating the escape of victims or in some cases paying “a sort of” ransom. He disclosed that the total money paid was about $1.5 million.
Saifadin, a high-ranking and affluent official of the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and Mardini, who was the assistant head of the Ottoman Archive in Turkey but has not returned to his job since the ISIS attacks on Kurdistan last summer, are part of the same KRG effort to help reunite shattered Yezidi families.
ISIS militants, who regard the Yezidis as “non-believers” because of their religion, have been in control of the town of Shingal ever since storming it in early August. Many of the predominant Yezidis were killed and women taken as war booty.
The gentle community of Yezidis, which has lived in northern Iraq for centuries, is trying to put itself back together since then.
Babasheikh Khirtu, president of the Yezidi Spiritual Council, has issued a decree ordering that kidnapped Yezidi women – almost all sexually abused and humiliated by their captors according to numerous accounts – should be taken back into their communities without any loss of honour.
At SAIFO’s shopping-mall headquarters, only a few of the many women there agreed to tell their stories.
Dlvin, using a pseudonym, recounted how she was kept in Mosul with other Yezidi women.
“They would only give us one piece of bread per day. Some days they would not give us any bread. Sometimes we would faint because of hunger. Then they would get angry at us,” recalled Dlvin, who ended up sold to a 70-year-old ISIS “emir” who already had four other Yezidi girls in his house, one of them an 11-year-old who had also been sexually abused.
Sara, another woman speaking under an assumed name, said she ended up at the home of an ISIS member living with his wife and children, living as a maid.
One day someone appeared and bought Sara from her ISIS “owner.” That person was in contact with Mahmoud and Saifadin.
Narin, another one of the girls, said that every time she saw one of the American or other jets that have been bombing ISIS positions, she wished they would drop their explosives at the place she was imprisoned with other Yezidi girls.
"We have earned the love and hearts of thousands of people. No achievement is bigger than this," said Mardini, about the rescue effort.
"We have united Kurdistan,” he said. “I am originally from Northern Kurdistan (in Turkey). I go to Syrian Kurdistan and save kidnapped Kurdish women from the Kurdistan Region. Shingal has crossed all boundaries.”
