The advertisement on the Telegram app as
chilling. A a girl for sale is “Virgin. Beautiful.
12 years old … Her price has reached $12,500 and she will be sold
soon.”

The posting in Arabic appeared on an encrypted conversation
along with ads for kittens, weapons and tactical gear. It was shared by
an activist with the minority Yazidi community, whose women and
children are being held as sex slaves by ISIL.

While the extremist
group is losing territory in its self-styled caliphate, it is
tightening its grip on an estimated 3,000 women and girls held as sex
slaves.

In a fusion of ancient barbaric practices and modern technology,
ISIL sells the women like chattel on smartphone apps and shares
databases that contain their photographs and the names of their “owners”
to prevent their escape through ISIL checkpoints.

Yazidi women
and children were taken prisoner in August 2014, when ISIL fighters
overran their villages in northern Iraq with the aim to eliminate the
Kurdish-speaking minority because of its ancient faith. Since then, Arab
and Kurdish smugglers have managed to free an average of 134 people a
month. But by May, an ISIL crackdown reduced those numbers to just 39 in
the past six weeks, according to figures provided by the Kurdistan
regional government.

Mirza Danai, founder of the German-Iraqi aid
organisation Luftbrucke Irak, said escape had become more difficult and
dangerous in the last two or three months.

“They register every
slave, every person under their owner, and therefore if she escapes,
every Daesh control or checkpoint, or security force – they know that
this girl … has escaped from this owner,” he said.

Lamiya Aji
Bashar tried to flee four times before finally escaping in March, racing
to government-controlled territory with ISIL fighters in pursuit. A
landmine exploded, killing her companions, 8-year-old Almas and
Katherine, 20. She never learned their last names. The explosion
left Lamiya blind in her right eye and her face scarred. Saved by the
man who smuggled her out, she spoke from her uncle’s home in the
northern Iraqi town of Baadre. She counts herself among the lucky.

“I
managed in the end, thanks to God, I managed to get away from those
infidels,” she said. “Even if I had lost both eyes, it would have been
worth it, because I have survived them.”

The Sunni extremist group
views the Yazidis as barely human. The Yazidi faith combines elements
of Islam, Christianity and Zoroastrianism, an ancient Persian religion.
Their pre-war population in Iraq was estimated around 500,000. Their
number today is unknown.

Nadia Mourad, an escapee, has appeared before the US congress and the European parliament to appeal for international help.

“Daesh

is proud of what it’s done to the Yazidis,” she told the parliament.
“They are being used has human shields. They are not allowed to escape
or flee. Probably they will be assassinated. Where is the world in all
this? Where is humanity?”

ISIL
relies on encrypted apps to sell the women and girls, according to an
activist who is documenting the transactions and asked not to be named
for fear of his safety. The activist showed the negotiations for the
captives in encrypted conversations as they were occurring in real time.
The postings appear primarily on Telegram and on Facebook and WhatsApp
to a lesser degree, he said.

Both
Facebook-owned WhatsApp and Telegram use end-to-end encryption to
protect users’ privacy. Both have said they consider protecting private
conversations and data paramount, and that they themselves cannot access
users’ content

Lamiya
was abducted from the village of Kocho, near the town of Sinjar, in the
summer of 2014. Her parents are presumed dead. Somewhere, she said, her
9-year-old sister Mayada remains captive. One photo she managed to send
to the family shows the little girl standing in front of an ISIL flag.
Lamiya recounted her captivity, describing how she was passed
from one ISIL follower to another, all of whom beat and violated her.
She was determined to escape.

She said her first “owner” was an
Iraqi ISIL commander who went by the name Abu Mansour in the city of
Raqqa, the de facto ISIL capital deep in Syria. He brutalised her, often
keeping her handcuffed. She tried to run away twice but was
caught, beaten and raped repeatedly. After a month, she said, she was
sold to another ISIL extremist in Mosul, Iraq’s second city in the
northern province of Nineveh. After two months with him, she was sold
again, this time to an ISIL bomb-maker who Lamiya said forced her to
help him make suicide vests and car bombs.

“I tried to escape from him. And he captured me, too, and he beat me.”

When
the bomb-maker grew bored with her, she was handed over to an ISIL
doctor in Hawija, a small ISIL-controlled Iraqi town. She said the
doctor, who was the ISIL head of the town hospital, also abused her.

From there, after more than a year, she managed to contact her relatives in secret.

Her
uncle said the family paid local smugglers $800 to arrange Lamiya’s
escape. She will be reunited with her siblings in Germany, but despite
everything, her heart remains in Iraq.

“We had a nice house with a big farm … I was going to school,” she said. “It was beautiful.”
[url]
http://www.fornaija.com/pin/13451/[/url]