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No international organization is looking for hundreds of Yezidi women and girls still in captivity by Islamist terrorists. Instead, their fate depends on an army of ragtag of activists, parents and detectives of chair.
The investigator’s eyes bask between the two photographs. In one, a young girl, perhaps 10 years, wears a colorful shirt, her loose hair. In the other, a woman, her face altered at an undetermined age and framed by a black hijab, looks at the camera.
The first image is one of the hundreds of images of young girls sent by desperate families to find dear beings who were kidnapped years ago, when militants of the Islamic State first rugged in Iraq and in Syria. Photos of older women come from various sources.
The woman examining the photographs has become skillful to find the revealing detail that could help confirm an identity – and lead to someone’s freedom. But she is not a professional investigator. Her name is bet Ibrahim, and the day she is the executive director of a non -profit organization in the suburbs of Maryland.
At night, by the light of a laptop screen, she travels the photos, hoping to locate captive women a decade ago.
“Sometimes, late at night, I work to see if this girl is someone who can be identified,” said Ibrahim while she compares the two photographs, looking for faces for any index – Lips, perhaps, or a revealing mole – that she could look at the same person.
“Ten years bring a lot of change to someone’s face and appearance,” she said. “It’s not easy.”
The disappeared people are all members of a religious minority, the Yezidi, which were a particular objective of the brutal campaign of terrorism that the Islamic State, also known as the Islamic State, was launched in 2014. In 2014. The years that followed, according to a United Nations commissionThe activists murdered, enslaved, raped and tortured at will. Some 3,100 Yézidis were killed and 6,800 were kidnapped in August 2014 only, a study estimates.
Rescuers
Now, more than half a decade since the fall of the self-proclaimed caliphate of the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, nearly 2,600 Yezidis remain unable to, according to to the non -profit organization of Ms. Ibrahim, the Free Yezidi Foundation; In 2022, the United Nations agency for the United Nations took the number of around 3,000. The Foundation, which used an alternative spelling for the ethno -aloral group, provides support services for Yezidian diaspora members.
Many are presumed to be dead, but Mrs. Ibrahim hopes that up to 1,000 are still in captivity, owned by their ravisseurs or transferred to the extended families of the combatants of the Middle East.
Although the United Nations called for the treatment of the Yezidis genocide, the United Nations agency forced to collect evidence of Islamic State atrocities ceased to operate last year. There is no official entity dedicated to the search for women – and their children.
This task was devoted to a sprawling network of activists, survivors, family members, informants and amateur detectives like Ms. Ibrahim, a Yazidi whose family left Iraq in the early 1990s. The New York Times interviewed people based in Maryland, Germany, Australia, Iraq and Syria.
They described a modern underground railway, on which trips often start with extracts from information and photographs shared via messaging applications. Sometimes this information is transmitted to the families of the missing, some of which hire informants and human smugglers to bring them together with their loved ones. Other times, it is shared with local authorities.
A member of the unofficial network, Abduallah Abbas Khalaf, helped free his niece from the Islamic State in 2014 using connections which he established as a beekeeper and a honey seller in Aleppo, Syria. Mr. Khalaf, who is Yézidi and is based in Iraq, says that he continued to release other captives through a variety of methods, including the usurpation of online activists.
“We connected to the telegrams of the Islamic State, and we used to claim that we were members of the Islamic State,” he said. To appear more convincing, he said, he would sometimes inquire about weapons and equipment.
“They would welcome us,” said Khalaf, “and after a while, they would publish photos of girls or boys for having sold.” While pretending to negotiate the price, he said, he would really try to adapt to where the captives.
Mr. Khalaf shared screenshots of what seemed to be Isis messaging channels on which women and children were tampered with. The images have shown that users of the merchant forum on sex slaves. Times has not been able to independently check the source of the images because many channels have since been made private or deleted.
At the height of the reign of the Islamic State in the parts of Syria and Iraq which it conquered, the slavery and the sale of women were carried out openly. Later, this became more discreet, experts said. Women and girls were purchased and sold online, then transferred through national borders, doing the work of those who would save them all the more difficult.
“While the Public Yazidi slave markets of the Islamic State Caliphate period no longer exist,” said Devorah Margolin, senior member of the Washington Institute for the Middle East policy, “some women remain enslaved by the affiliates of the Islamic State and continued to be sold by supporters of the group even after the fall of its caliphate. »»
According to investigators, experts and reports, captives have been found in houses related to Islamic State members as far as Turkey and the Gaza. Other Yezidis found themselves alongside their kidnappers in overcrowded and dangerous desert camps.
According to Nadia’s Initiative, around 3,600 Yézidis managed to return to their family, according to the Yazidi.
One of them, Sherine Hakrash, said that she had been retained in captivity in Syria with her two daughters until she was sold to a Saudi. Speaking in a fiery way and sometimes in tears by phone from her new house in Australia, Ms. Hakrash said that it was too painful to talk about what girls looked like in her last view in 2018.
“I don’t know anything about them,” she said. “If they are alive. If they need me. How their situation is.
The upheavals in the Middle East in the last year and a half have complicated additional efforts to locate and save the missing people. In Iraq, for example, the government recently led a team of international experts investigating Islamic State crimes to complete their work.
In Syria, the eviction of President Bashar al-Assad led both to hope and fear among the Yézidis. They want to take the opportunity to search for the missing but worry that instability can open the way to an Islamic State resurgence.
The detention camp
While their caliphate had fallen in 2019, Islamic State fighters fled to the region, some taking their captives with them. In many cases, women have been forced to marry their kidnappers, integrating them into large clans which could then track them into the world.
In December in Germany, federal Accused two people who, according to them, were Iraqi members of the Islamic State of having sexually abused two young Yezidi girls whom they kept as slaves. The girls had been selected captive by the couple at the age of 5 and 12. In Gaza, a woman kidnapped by the Islamic State at 11 years old and, US officials sayLater sold and forced to marry a Hamas fighter, was rescued in October after the death of his captor.
Captivity for some Yezidis has grown further after the detention of their captors.
Some found themselves in Al Hol, a sprawling nightmare of a detention camp in the eastern desert of Syria. The captive Yezidi women are forced to live alongside members of the Islamic State and their families. The camp, in which thousands of people are detained, is dangerous – the murders are common and there have been reports decapitation.
For the network of rescuers, Al Hol presents a special challenge. Captives He is reluctant to identify as Yézidis for fear that members of the Islamic State among them, some of whom have organized themselves in religious police, will target them. Others may have been caught in captivity when they were too young to find out their inheritance.
“The way they were enslaved outside the Al Hol camp, they are enslaved – torture, everything,” said camp director Jihan Hanan, who worked with Yézidis investigators To help extract the captives of the camp.
A member of the informal rescue network, Barjas Khidhir Sabri, is a Yazidi from the province of Sinjar in Iraq who currently lives in an Iraqi camp for people displaced internally. It is About 100 miles from Al Hol.
From his tent, using a little more than his minds and a smartphone, Mr. Sabri has developed his own network of informants, including men who, according to him, are members of the Islamic State living in Al Hol.
“I don’t trust them and they don’t trust me,” said Sabri about Islamic State. “I have to work with them. I have no regrets because a possible way to save women and girls, it is worth it. »»
Ibrahim said that the Yezidi Free Foundation had in no case treated Islamic State members. But for many families, despair eclipses the disgust of treating – and even paying – those who belong to the terrorist group, said Sabri.
When a camp woman is identified as a possible Yezidi captive, Ms. Hanan works with security guards to organize a discreet interview.
Hanan said she had seen seven Yézidies girls and women released from Al Hol at least the last two years.
But it’s not always easy.
Some Yezidis women who have given birth to babies from their kidnappers fear that their children will not be accepted by the Yazidi community. Some who have been raped fear to go home only to be avoided. Others still captured as young children only know the families of their captors and may not even realize that they are Yezidi.
“We must make sure that women are able to make a choice in a safe space,” said Ibrahim, non -profit director.
Marwa Nawaf Abas seized the opportunity of freedom.
“I was chosen to be captive as a sex slave for three months of torture and sold to several Islamic State terrorists,” said Abas, who was 21 when she was rescued, in an interview.
After having escaped his kidnappers in Raqqa, Syria, in 2014, Ms. Abas was offered temporary protection by a local family. She contacted her uncle and family paid smugglers to take her from the Islamic State area to an area controlled by the Kurds.
Ms. Abas has moved to Germany and works in a capillary transplantation center.
“I am very happy now in Germany,” she said.
Falih Hassan Reports contributed to Baghdad.
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