For Yazidi Women, Escaping ISIS Doesn't Mean The Ordeal Is Over
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
This hour, we start with the view of the complicated road home for female captives of the self-proclaimed Islamic State or ISIS. Some 5,000 Yazidis remain hostages of the group in Iraq, and many of them are women and girls. They're sold for sex among the extremist militants. And for those who manage to get away, they face a new trauma of reintegrating into a conservative society that attaches a woman's honor to her virginity before marriage. Some have come back pregnant in a country where abortions are illegal. NPR's Leila Fadel sent this report.
BARZAN: (Foreign language spoken).
LEILA FADEL, BYLINE: Barzan is a young Yazidi man who meets us in a strip mall in Duhok, in northern Iraq. He worked his contacts in Syria, found his sister and got her back from ISIS captivity. We're only using his first name to protect his sister's identity. She's only 15, and the militants raped her.
BARZAN: (Foreign language spoken).
UNIDENTIFIED TRANSLATOR: He say yeah, she tell me one night, one person - he come and he take my hand by the bed. And one time he raped me.
FADEL: It's a very rare admission in a community whose entire fabric has been shredded by this tragedy. The Yazidis, an ethno-religious minority in Iraq's north, already were a conservative, insular community. And now families are torn between empathy for the suffering women and generations of tribal codes of honor that have never faced such a test.
Even if ISIS is defeated tomorrow, the women will suffer the aftermath of sexual trauma, and children born from these rapes will have an unknown fate. Barzan's sister is not pregnant, but his five other sisters, his niece and his mom are still with ISIS.
BARZAN: (Foreign language spoken).
UNIDENTIFIED TRANSLATOR: If all of them came back and all of them was pregnant, I don't have any problem. Even if she wants to have the baby, OK. If she want to have an abortion, OK. If she have baby, I will take care about the baby.
FADEL: He knows others won't be as accepting. In Iraq, abortion is illegal, unless a woman might die giving birth, so women must resort to clandestine abortions from doctors willing to do them illegally. Khlaida Khalid is a Yazidi adviser to the speaker of the parliament in the autonomous Kurdish region in the North of Iraq. She's working on the cases.
KHLAIDA KHALID: (Through translator) As a Kurdish community, we have societal rules among us. Some of these families have accepted the reality, the de facto situation they've been put in. We're more concerned about what will happen later to these women. Will they face discrimination or violence from their families?
FADEL: She says the Kurdish parliament may legalize abortions for victims of rape by ISIS. We meet Nayef al-Mandekan, a tribal leader displaced from his the village, but helping look after his people in the city of Duhok.
NAYEF AL-MANDEKAN: (Foreign language spoken).
FADEL: He speaks to us in his formal living room with seven young women who escaped ISIS nearby. They look down and say very little.
AL-MANDEKAN: (Foreign language spoken).
FADEL: He says women who were raped will be accepted back as innocent, but not children born from those rapes. In that case, abortion would be preferable.
AL-MANDEKAN: (Foreign language spoken).
FADEL: Every tribe and every family will have to make their own decision, he says.
Right now, publicly, Yazidi leaders are saying all the right things. The women will be welcomed back as innocent victims. They will not be shunned or punished. But already, health authorities are administering so-called virginity tests to Yazidi women who return from captivity. Kurdish officials say they're voluntary and done at the request of the victim or by the court as part of an effort to document what they're calling a genocide against Yazidis. But health and rights groups call the test scientifically useless and traumatic for rape victims.
Sherizaan Minwalla is the International Rescue Committee's women's protection and empowerment coordinator in Erbil.
SHERIZAAN MINWALLA: These are women and girls who have suffered, in many cases, sexual violence. Even if they haven't, it's an assault on their body, really, and it's invasive. And many of them, you know, may not want to have it done but may feel pressured to in order to prove that they haven't been raped.
FADEL: She says issues of honor and shame dominate the Yazidi and the larger Iraqi society. Women accused of sex outside marriage risk so-called honor killings. So far, there has been no documentation of violence against these women and girls who've escaped ISIS. But Minwalla says a few have been ostracized. She worries that as more escape or are freed, they could face a life of rejection or scorn from their own communities. Leila Fadel, NPR News, Erbil.
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