Ads like this pop up on encrypted apps as Islamic State tightens its grip on sex slaves, write Lori Hinnant, Maya Alleruzzo and Balint Szlanko.
The posting in Arabic is chilling. A girl for sale:”Virgin. Beautiful. 12 years old; Her price has reached $12 500 and she will be sold soon.”
The advertisement, along with others for kittens, tactical gear and weapons, appeared on an encrypted Telegram app and was shared with The Associated Press by an activist with Iraq’s persecuted Yazidi community, which is trying to free an estimated 3 000 women and girls held as sex slaves by IS extremists.
As the IS loses control of one city after another in its self-styled caliphate, it is tightening its grip on its captives, taking the Yazidis deeper into its territory and selling them as chattel on popular encrypted apps such as Telegram and WhatsApp.
The extremists target smugglers who rescue captives for assassination and deploy a slave database with captives’ photos and owners’ names to prevent escape through checkpoints.
Thousands of Kurdish-speaking Yazidis were taken prisoner and thousands more were massacred when IS fighters overran their northern Iraqi villages in August 2014. Since then, as the Yazidi captives have been conscripted into sexual slavery, smugglers have managed to free 2554 women and girls. The AP has obtained a batch of 48 head shots of the captives, smuggled out by an escapee. Mirza Danai, founder of the German-Iraqi aid organisation Luftbrucke Irak, said the slave database documentED the captives as if they were property.
‘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,” said Danai, using a common acronym to refer to IS.
One of those girls is Lamiya Aji Bashar. In March she made her fifth attempt at escape, running to the border with IS fighters in pursuit. A land mine exploded, and two Yazidi girls accompanying her were killed. The bomb left Lamiya blind in her right eye, her face scarred by melted skin.
Speaking from a bed at her uncle’s home in the northern Iraqi town of Baadre, the 18-year-old said that despite being disfigured, she did not regret her perilous escape from her jailers.
‘Even if I had lost both eyes, it would have been worth it,” she said,”because I have survived them.”
The Yazidis have been targeted by IS because they practise an ancient faith combining elements of Islam, Christianity and Zoroastrianism, and the Sunni extremists view them as infidels.The photos obtained by AP depict girls dressed in finery, some in heavy make-up. They stare at the camera. Some are barely teenagers.Nazdar Murat is among them.
She was about 16 when she was abducted along with more than two dozen girls and women who fled their home in Iraq’s Sinjar area when IS took over.
Inside a tent outside Dahuk, Nouri Murat, Nazdar’s mother, said her daughter managed to call once, six months ago for a few seconds.
“She said she was in Mosul,” said Murat, referring to Iraq’s second-largest city. Hussein Koro al-Qaidi, head of the Yazidi assistance committee in the northern Iraqi city of Dahuk, said no one had stepped up on the Yazidis’ behalf. Contraband photos of captives offer families a thread of hope that they might see them again. But they are also used by IS to sell them.
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 cannot access users’ content. Telegram says it will remove illegal public content”when deemed appropriate”.
WhatsApp can, under its terms of service, ban a phone number if it believes the user has submitted illegal content.
“Telegram is extremely popular in the Middle East,” said Telegram spokesman Markus Ra.”This, unfortunately, includes the more marginal elements and the broadest law-abiding masses alike.” He said the company was committed to preventing abuse.
Mark Steinfeld, a spokesman for WhatsApp, said:”We have zero tolerance for this type of behaviour and disable accounts when provided with evidence of activity that violates our terms. We encourage people to use our reporting tools if they encounter this type of behaviour.”
The captives’ odds of rescue grow slimmer each day.
Even when IS retreats from towns like Ramadi or Fallujah, the missing girls are nowhere to be found among the thousands of newly liberated civilians.
Kurdistan’s besieged regional government had slowed reimbursement to families who had paid off smugglers or ransom demands, Andrew Slater of the Yazidi advocacy group Yazda said.
“There are still thousands of women and kids in captivity but it’s getting harder and harder to get them out.”
ANA-AP