The young Yazidi woman in a blue headscarf says her name is Hana. She is 18. She is standing in the muddy courtyard of her new temporary home – an abandoned, unfinished building outside the Iraqi-Kurdish town of Zakho. Beside her is Vian Dakhil, a politician from the same religious minority. Hana is speaking rapidly and clutching Dakhil’s hand as though she’s terrified this local heroine has something far more important to do than listen to her story.

Hana was abducted by Islamic State (Isis) last August. Heavily armed, black-clad militants stormed her village and shot dead her father, four brothers, two uncles and six cousins. They then separated her from her older female relatives. “They drove me away in a truck with other unmarried girls. Two fighters took me and held me prisoner in their house. They beat me and gave me scraps to eat.” After 36 days, Hana escaped when one of her captors left a window unlocked. “It was like a suicide mission, but I didn’t care. I ran for three days and nights to get away.”

Dakhil, a slim woman with long auburn hair, is not going anywhere. She listens intently as her two armed bodyguards stand at a discreet distance. “How is your health? What else did the men do to you?” she asks.

Blood rushes to Hana’s cheeks. Her eyes, locked on to Dakhil’s, well up with tears. They look at each other in silence. “It’s OK, I will help you, I will help you,” says the politician eventually, freeing her hand from Hana’s grip to pull the girl into a hug.

Vian Dakhil is one of only two Yazidis in Iraq’s parliament. It seems obvious that it’s a lonely job; she’s also the only woman from the besieged minority in an assembly that is three-quarters male. (The other Yazidi politician, a man, is so inactive that few people seem to know he exists.) But I don’t realise how lonely her job is until I’ve spent a 14-hour day with her in northern Iraq, visiting Yazidi survivors of Isis carnage. It’s a relentless marathon of inhaling dust, kissing babies and comforting catastrophically traumatised, grief-wracked refugees like Hana.

Great expectations: residents of unfinished buildings near the city of Zakho wait for the arrival of Vian Dakhil. Photograph: Andrew Quilty/Oculi

At 9pm we fall into a restaurant outside the city of Dohuk. I go to the bathroom while Dakhil and her eight-strong entourage of drivers, security men and assistants wait to be seated. When I return, the 43-year-old former university lecturer is sitting alone at a table big enough for a banquet. “Where are the others?” I ask. She gestures towards a table on the far side of the room. “They are my staff. It’s not correct to eat together,” she tells me. A waiter brings a slab of Turkish bread the size and shape of a baby seal, and she tucks in. “And besides, they are all men. They don’t want to eat with me.”

Dakhil has further reason to feel isolated: her efforts to help her fellow Yazidis have made her an assassination target. Ever since Isis attacked Yazidi territory around Mount Sinjar in northwest Iraq last August, the politician has been at the top of the Sunni extremist organisation’s hit list. “They hate professional, educated women. They hate me especially because I am speaking out and trying to rescue my sisters.”

During their bloody rampage, Isis kidnapped an estimated 5,000 Yazidi women and children, the majority of whom remain captive today. Enslaved as malak yamiin (spoils of war), the women must endure repeated rape, forced marriage and violent abuse. Some are sold in open markets – virgins fetch the highest price – while others are given as “gifts” to fighters in Syria and elsewhere. To Isis’s irritation, Dakhil has lobbied tirelessly at home and abroad for more action and resources to help free them. “I have heard from government intelligence that I am now their most wanted woman. If they capture me, they will execute me at once.”

I am now their most wanted woman. If they capture me, they will execute me at once Vian Dakhil

Dakhil briefly made global headlines – and first came on Isis’s radar – during last summer’s assault. The militants killed thousands of Yazidis in an ethnic-cleansing campaign against the 700,000-strong sect. Thousands more villagers fled up the barren slopes of Mount Sinjar and became trapped. When news emerged that people were dying from hunger and thirst, and teenage girls were jumping to their deaths down ravines to avoid rape or capture, Dakhil stood up in Iraq’s parliament to beg for intervention. “Brothers, I appeal to you in the name of all humanity… Save us! Save us!” she cried. Her speech was so charged with pain and horror that she collapsed before she could finish it.

A video of the speech quickly spread via YouTube, alerting the world to the Yazidis’ plight. Iraq’s parliament voted to start humanitarian airdrops over Mount Sinjar and to launch airstrikes on Isis positions in the area. (“The first time our government has ever agreed on anything in its history,” Dakhil recalls drily.) President Obama claimed her emotional plea influenced his decision to allow US forces to take part in the air operations as well – although the fact that Isis had surged within 25 miles of western oil investments in the Iraqi-Kurdish capital of Erbil probably had something to do with it, too.

A week after her speech, on 12 August, Dakhil almost died in a helicopter crash on the mountain side during her own mission to rescue stranded Yazidis. “There was a riot as people tried to climb aboard. Our helicopter was overloaded and crashed into a rock.” The pilot was killed and Dakhil still walks with a cane after breaking her leg and some ribs.

A place of safety: a grateful young Yazidi refugee kisses Vian Dakhil as she visits the Khanke camp. Photograph: Andrew Quilty/Oculi

Almost six months on, the situation for all Yazidis in the region remains dire. (Major humanitarian efforts by the Iraqi and US governments lasted only a fortnight.) With the help of continued airstrikes, Kurdish peshmerga forces recaptured most of the Sinjar area from Isis in December. But the conflict has blown apart decades of relatively strife-free coexistence among northern Iraq’s diverse ethnic and religious groups. “We have close to half a million displaced Yazidis living in refugee camps and abandoned buildings,” Dakhil says, updating me over the phone in late January. “Their houses have been burned and all their possessions plundered. We don’t know when, or even if, they will be able to return.”

The same uncertainty hangs over the fate of the kidnapped women and girls. To date, 282 have managed to escape, either on their own or with the help of Dakhil and others. Through surviving family members, Yazidi activists have compiled a list of more than 4,000 names of women and girls who are still imprisoned. With their plight long since dropped from the news cycle, Dakhil will not give up. She hears news about the women’s situation daily through secret conversations with those who have access to mobile phones. Many young women – the current figure is over 100 – have committed suicide rather than endure rape, she says, often by hanging themselves with their headscarves or cutting their wrists. She learned recently that 10 under-age girls had been sent to hospital in Isis- controlled Mosul. They had horrific injuries from repeated sexual abuse, including ruptured vaginas and other organ damage. Two of them had died, her contacts told her.

“How is this happening in the 21st century? How?” she rails. “In this situation, I can’t think about the threats against my life. I have to do everything I can.”

When she’s not attending parliament in Baghdad, Dakhil lives with her extended family in Erbil. Built on top of an Ottoman fort and cocooned within the peshmerga-protected borders of the Kurdistan region, the city is touted as Iraq’s “urban success story”. It is the epicentre of multinational oil and other foreign investments in the country, boasting high-rise hotels with names like The Classy, nightclubs, modern gyms and a “Sushi Lounge”. But the feeling of safe distance is cultural rather than geographical. Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city, which Isis captured for its self-styled caliphate last June, is just 50 miles away.

When I visit in late October, three months after the Isis attack, a sense of crisis still pervades Dakhil’s home. Behind the high walls of her compound, manned by armed guards, the garden is piled high with pink binbags full of relief supplies. Various members of her family, old and young, are squatting on the verandah packing the supplies in preparation for her 14-hour tour of refugee areas the following day.

A life in danger: Yazidi women and children who have been displaced by Isis troops. Photograph: Andrew Quilty/Oculi

Dressed in jeans and a red sweater, and walking with her cane, Dakhil takes me into their lounge. It’s a cavernous room with two brocade-covered sofas and matching armchairs, and a giant glass coffee table in the middle – the kind of space designed for large family celebrations. “Until a few weeks ago, we had five Yazidi families living in this room, about 35 people. It was crazy,” she says, speaking English in her rich Kurdish accent. “They had nowhere to go after we rescued them from Mount Sinjar, but we’ve found better places for them now.”

Dakhil’s background is far removed from most of her Yazidi constituents, who typically live off the land in near-poverty. Her father is a surgeon. She has four sisters and two brothers who are doctors, another brother who is a lawyer and a pharmacist sister (she is the oldest of nine). Dakhil fell into politics after lecturing in biology and other subjects at a local university; some of her Yazidi students were targeted in the civil terror that ensued after the 2003 fall of Saddam Hussein and she stepped in to help. The family belongs to Iraq’s modern elite, yet their clan identity is undiluted.

“When something like this happens to the Yazidi people, it happens to all of us. We are family, we feel it as deeply as that.” The sexual enslavement of Yazidi women, she adds, is like “the public rape of our community”.

The mostly ethnic-Kurd Yazidis are not the only group to be targeted by Isis. In all, the UN estimates two million Iraqis so far have been persecuted or displaced by the jihadists’ reign of destruction, including Christian, Turkmen, Shabak and Arab Shia (who are a minority in the north). But Isis believes Yazidism, one of the world’s oldest religions, fusing elements of Zoroastrianism, Sufism, early Islam and Christianity, is godless. It condemns sect members as “arrogant non-believers” who must convert to Islam or die. Moreover, Isis has not systematically kidnapped women from any other minority – only Yazidi women are deemed impure enough to be slaves.

Isis makes no attempt to hide its exploitation of Yazidi women; in fact, it boasts about it. An article published in October in its online magazine, Dabiq, celebrated the revival of seventh-century practices of using sex slaves to relieve male urges and prevent sins such as adultery. “One should remember that enslaving the families of the kuffar [non-believers] and taking their women as concubines is a firmly established aspect of Islamic law,” the article said. A few weeks later an Isis pamphlet detailed how followers should treat these “concubines”, with special reference to virgins and underage girls. “If she is a virgin, her master can have intercourse with her immediately after taking possession of her,” it said. “It is permissible to have intercourse with the female slave who hasn’t reached puberty if she is fit for intercourse.” The pamphlet added that it was also permissible to buy, sell, or give as a gift female slaves, “for they are merely property, which can be disposed of”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Save our people: displaced Yazidi, who fled the violence in the Iraqi town of Sinjar, hold banners as they take part in a demonstration at the Iraqi-Syrian border crossing in Fishkhabour. Photograph: Youssef Boudlal/Reuters

Persecution of the Yazidis is not new. “In our history we have suffered 72 campaigns of genocide,” says Dakhil, referring to frequent massacres that occurred during the Ottoman Empire. As a Yazidi leader she feels betrayed that history has repeated itself in modern times. Initially neither the Kurdish peshmerga stationed around Mount Sinjar, nor the majority of Sunni Arabs who had long shared territory with the Yazidis, helped to defend them. “Isis would never have succeeded if they had done more,” she says, angrily. “It’s a great tragedy.” All Yazidi celebrations, such as weddings and the party-like annual pilgrimage to their sacred temple, Lalish, have been put on hold. “It’s impossible to feel joyful with so many dead, missing and captured. We are in mourning.”

Refusing to single herself out, Dakhil plays down Isis’s promise to assassinate her. Yet she knows the danger is real: for the crime of doing their jobs outside the home, Isis has executed numerous female lawyers, teachers, doctors and other professionals of all faiths across Iraq. They reserve a special fondness for murdering elected female officials. She worries about her two youngest sisters, Jwan, a 27-year-old gynaecologist, and Deelan, a 24-year-old trainee surgeon. They are doubly vulnerable because they are both Yazidi and “beautiful, educated, independent women”.

The next day I make the journey with Dakhil from Erbil to areas around the cities of Duhok and Zakho, near the Turkish border. Hopeful tour operators have dubbed the region “the Switzerland of the Middle East” for its stunning landscape, but it is now home to one million refugees from Iraq and Syria crammed into UN camps, schools and half-finished buildings. Around half are Yazidi. Dakhil travels with two armed security guards in an unmarked, unarmoured car to avoid drawing attention. The day’s plan is unclear. Her personal assistant, a male cousin, never releases her schedule to anyone – not even to her family – and she’s sketchy on the details herself.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest On the run: two Yazidi girls who escaped captivity from Isis militants on the roof of a school in Duhok. Andrew Quilty Photograph: Andrew Quilty/Oculi

On the way, she receives a number of calls from Yazidi women being held by Isis. Even listening in to a language I don’t understand, the moments are heartstopping.

One woman, Dakhil tells me straight afterwards, was being held in a house in the town of Tal Afar outside Mosul with her two teenage daughters. “She said that Isis fighters had just come to the house. They ordered her to prepare her daughters because they would return tomorrow to take them to be sold. She was hysterical and asking me what she should do.” Dakhil told her that if there was any opportunity to escape with minimum risk, they should take it. If not, she should press the fighters later for information about where the girls were taken and who bought them.

Mobile phones, strictly forbidden by Isis, are the women’s only lifeline. Later, I hear from a 19-year-old woman I meet called Nofa about how their use carries appalling danger. Nofa had recently escaped with her baby son after being imprisoned in a house with 20 other women. They had two secret mobile phones between them. “We asked our relatives to top up the credit and hid them in baby formula or buried them outside when we weren’t using them.” Her perilous decision to run away was partly prompted by the brutal treatment of two captives whose phones were discovered. “The fighters made us all come outside to watch. Then they tied the women to the back of a pickup truck and dragged them through the street until they were covered in blood.” The women survived, Nofa says, but only just.

Dakhil’s priority when she speaks to the imprisoned women is to get details about their situation and location in case she can facilitate their escape. She informs the peshmerga at the nearest checkpoints outside Isis-held territory in the hope that the soldiers will help the women if they manage to reach there. She also liaises with a small network of underground activists – mostly sympathetic Sunni Arabs – who are helping the women in places like Mosul and Tal Afar. “It’s very frustrating. We can’t take direct action to rescue all the women at once. We can only try to free them on a case-by-case basis.” Some women have been exchanged for ransoms in deals usually brokered by Arab middlemen. Dakhil wants the peshmerga to launch a military operation with the help of international coalition airstrikes. She has travelled to Europe and Washington DC to elicit the support of foreign governments. “So far all the officials I’ve met have been sympathetic, but no one has made any promises,” she says.

She has learned fast not to get her hopes up. While she was convalescing at home after the helicopter crash, she posted a message to Michelle Obama’s Facebook page. She remembered the widely shared photo of the US first lady holding up a #BringBackOurGirls sign after the Boko Haram kidnappings of 276 Nigerian schoolgirls. The Yazidi women’s abductions were still fresh, and Dakhil was convinced a similar campaign would ignite to bring them back, too. “It’s not that numbers matter, even one girl is bad enough. But we did have 5,000 taken.” She received no direct response from Michelle Obama. While she tries to make progress on freeing the women, Dakhil is aware that professional medical and psychological help is crucial for those who do come home.

Of the almost 300 who have escaped so far, more than a few (exact numbers are unavailable) have returned pregnant. Others have serious injuries from prolonged sexual violence. Nearly all find it almost impossible to speak out loud about the details of their ordeal: there is a powerful stigma attached to rape in Yazidi culture, despite the fact that the sect’s formal doctrines reject any form of chastisement for women who have been assaulted.

Kurdish and Yazidi local authorities have already jointly set up one safe house for escaped women to help them to recover in private. Dakhil is working with women’s groups and other humanitarian organisations to provide more safe houses and welfare services – including trauma counselling and education for their families to prevent the women being shamed. “After everything they have been through, it is impossible for them to resume normal lives,” says Dakhil. “We must be ready for our women to return.”

As for resuming her own “normal life”, Dakhil tells me she has no plans to give up politics. “I am working 24 hours a day, but I am not doing it because I am a parliamentarian,” she says. “I’m doing it as Vian. I’m doing it as a Yazidi. I don’t think it’s possible for me to stop for a very long time.”

An earlier version of this article appeared in the American edition of Marie Claire

Follow Abigail Haworth on Twitter @AbiHaworth