Yazidi woman recounts decapitation of husband and loss of 16-year-old daughter taken to serve as ISIS sex slave

Daughter 'gathered his teeth that had been sprayed by the sniper fire'

A Yazidi mother speaks out against ISIS, who executed her husband and took one of her daughters as a sex slave.

LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) -The Daily Mail reported the story as 33-year-old Hayar recounted the horrific day she lost her husband and daughter.

"When ISIS was killing everyone, I went to see my husband. He was just covered in blood and I saw that his head was separated from his body. His head was destroyed. My daughter, Shilan, who is nine, fell down on her father's body and I could not pull her off."

Hayar cried as she continued, saying her daughter "was shocked, she could not breathe properly for two hours. The killing, she [still] remembers."

The murder happened last August 3 when ISIS attacked the Tel-Azer complex, south of Sinjar Mountain. Over fifty Yazidis were captured and several were killed or taken as sex slaves.

"We drove to this field where there were many other families. ISIS arrested everybody there. They separated out the women and children and the men were put into another room."

That was the last time Hayar saw her 16-year-old daughter. She was one of 24 "beautiful" girls taken as sex slaves. "It has been a year and almost two months, and I have heard nothing about my daughter," Hayar said.

ISIS members believe raping women is their right according to teachings from the Quar'an and many women are driven to suicide as a means of relief.

Despite the horrific testimony, Haray's tale was not yet complete:

"After they took the girls, they told the men, you must be Muslims. Most of the men refused. They tried to run away." 

She described the slaughter of Yazidi men who tried to run. The men were brought down by swords, sniper rifles and AK47s.

15-year-old Arkad, Kaya's son, said, "One younger ISIS man wanted to kill the kids [and me], but another ISIS man, who was responsible for the killing, said you can only kill men, you cannot kill kids."

That was when the jihadists began to decapitate their victims.

"I saw another ISIS fighter, who was in the field, beheading [a bearded] Yazidi with a sword," Arkad added.

Survivors were released from a small building next to the field of victims following the beheadings and that was when the family discovered Qassem, Hayar's husband, whose head had literally been blown off.

"I barely recognized him because he was so deformed. His head was separated from his body," Hayar shared. "There was so much blood, his head had been blown off by a sniper rifle."

When her 17-year-old son, Farhad, could not be found among the bodies, Hayar knew he had escaped in the mountain. She searched for him while her children remained with Qassem's body but did not find him.

"When I got back [to the field] I saw my [other] daughter. She was crying telling me that her [nine-year-old] sister had collapsed on her father's dead body," Hayar said. 

When she tried to pull her daughter from Quassem's body, she refused. "She was grasping him and she was covered in his blood [and] my daughter had gathered his teeth that had been prayed by the sniper fire."

As Hayar recounted the scene, Shilan held her head and remained silent.

"Look, she is living in trauma," Hayar said while pointing at her daughter. "Nobody can help us, as we are without any man."

"ISIS also shot a mortar at us when they left. But it did not explode," she said. Hayar gathered her family and fled to Sinjar Mountain, where Hayar said they "spent around 12 days ... After nine days I heard that my eldest son was alive."

Once the family reunited with him, they escaped with help from Kurdish forces who led them to the Syrian border. They then traveled to the relative safety of Iraqi Kurdistan.

"My daughter brought her father's teeth to Kurdistan. [And] we buried them near the Syrian border," Hayar recounted.

Shilan wanted to be a lawyer but since her father's death and sister's abduction, she said, "I don't like school [now] I hate anything that is Arabic." She added that she didn't "want to be here, and I just want our girls out of captivity."

Though Hayar wants to take her family outside Iraq, she hesitates due to the hope of getting her daughter back. 

"I don't know anything about my other daughter, [but] some people have told me she has killed herself."

The family's heartbreaking story is, unfortunately, only one of thousands across the Middle East. ISIS continues to murder men and rape women, destroy families and tear communities apart. Until the death of the regime, families like Hayar's will continue to encounter death and sorrow.

---

'Help Give every Student and Teacher FREE resources for a world-class Moral Catholic Education'

Copyright 2021 - Distributed by Catholic Online