Kidnapped and sold into slavery at 14, one former Yazidi sex slave finally had the chance to confront her brutal Islamic State captor in a heartwrenching moment that has gone viral.
Standing before her abuser, Ashwaq Haji Hamid demanded answers, while the captured militant stood with his head bowed, refusing to look his victim in the eye for the entire confrontation. “Why did you do that to me?” she asked in a video filmed by Iraqi TV, demanding that he raise his head to face her.
You’ve destroyed my life. You took everything from me. Everything I dreamed of.
Before the confrontation, Hamid bravely recounted how she had been among 300-400 Yazidi girls and women who were sold as slaves after thousands of men were killed by Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) terrorists in the Yazidi heartland of Mount Sinjar in 2014. The harrowing interview was broadcast by the Al-Iraqiya news channel on November 26.
Hamid recalled that the militant, called Abu Hamam, had bought her at an IS slave market in Mosul, Iraq, where the teen had been brought from Syria. He would sexually abuse and beat her several times a day.
Now you know what torture is, what it’s like to be tortured, what loneliness is. If you had any sense, any feelings, you wouldn’t have raped me when I was 14-years-old.
“I was the age of your son, the age of your daughter,” she continued, before eventually fainting and collapsing to the ground in front of her now-handcuffed captor.
Hamid fled to Germany in 2015 and began to build a new life, but was forced to confront the trauma again when she bumped into who she initially believed was Hamam on a street in Stuttgart.
She told German authorities she had seen her abuser and accused them at the time of not taking her case seriously enough, although they said they could not identify the man based on her descriptions. Fearing for her life again, Hamid decided she would rather return to live in a refugee camp with her father in Iraq.
Also on rt.com Israeli lawmakers vote against recognizing ISIS’ anti-Yazidi cleansing as genocideHamid told Iraqi TV last month that she had made a mistake in identifying the man in Germany because he resembled her attacker.
Hamam has since been arrested by Iraqi authorities, who Hamid said asked her to come to Baghdad for the meeting.
This story has been updated to reflect the fact that Hamid admitted she did not meet her attacker in Germany, but mistakenly identified a man who resembled him.
Like this story? Share it with a friend!