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2022-02-11 Iraq
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Adrift after Enslavement, Yazidi Teen Says She Can't Go Home
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Roza Barakat's tormentors have been defeated, but the horrors she endured still hold her captive.
She was 11 years old when she was captured and enslaved by the Islamic State group, along with thousands of other Yazidi women and girls taken when the militants overran northern Iraq in their brutal 2014 campaign.
Torn from her family in the town of Sinjar, the enclave of the ancient religious Yazidi minority, she was taken to Syria, sold multiple times and repeatedly raped. She bore a child, a boy she has since lost. Now, at 18, she speaks little of her native Kurdish dialect, Kurmanji.
With the defeat of IS in 2019, Barakat slipped into the shadows, opting to hide in the turmoil that followed the worst of the battles. As IS fighters were arrested, their wives and children were packed into detention camps. Barakat was free, but she couldn't go home.
"I don't know how I'll face my community," she told The Associated Press, speaking in Arabic, as she nervously played with the ends of her long dark braid, the red polish on her dainty fingers fading.
For years, her IS captors told her she would never be accepted if she returned. "I believed them," she said.
Barakat's tale, corroborated by Yazidi and Syrian Kurdish officials, is a window into the complicated realities faced by many Yazidi women who came of age under the brutal rule of IS. Traumatized and lost, many struggle to come to terms with the past, while the Yazidi community is at odds over how to accept them.
"What do you expect from a child who was raped at 12, gave birth at 13?" said Faruk Tuzu, co-chair of Yazidi House, an umbrella of Yazidi organizations in northeastern Syria. "After so much shock and abuse they don't believe in anything anymore, they don't belong anywhere."
The AP does not typically identify people who say they are victims of sexual assault unless they grant permission.
Barakat spoke to the AP from a safe house run by Tuzu's group just a few days after the leader of the Islamic State group, believed to have played a key role in the enslavement of Yazidi women, was killed in a U.S. raid in northwestern Syria.
She shrugged off the news, saying it doesn't make a difference.
IS first sold Barakat to an Iraqi from Tal Afar, a man older than her father. She shudders as she recounts how he "made me call his wife 'mother.'" After a few months she was sold to another man.
Eventually, her IS captors gave her a choice: Convert to Islam and marry an IS fighter, or be sold again. She converted, she says, to avoid being sold. She married a Lebanese they chose for her, a man who ferried food and equipment for IS fighters.
"He was better than most," she said. At 13, she gave birth to a son, Hoodh. At the peak of the militants' self-proclaimed "caliphate," they lived in the city of Raqqa, the IS capital.
Once, she begged her husband to find out what happened to her older sisters who had been taken just like her. She had lost hope that her parents were still alive.
Some weeks later, he told her he found one of her sisters, holding up a photo of a woman in Raqqa's slave market where Yazidi girls were sold.
"How different she looks," Barakat remembers thinking.
Read the rest at the link 
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Posted by badanov 2022-02-11 00:00||
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