“It was a lovely life. I had a big family and there was always a lot of laughter,” says 16-year-old Nihad Alawsi, speaking about her Yazidi community in northern Iraq. “I’m one of 18 siblings, but I was always my dad’s favourite.” She remembers the weddings, when the girls would get their hair and make-up done, and the days spent as a little girl drawing pictures of the flowers breaking through the Iraqi landscape.

Then came the day that cut short her childhood. Speaking via a translator, Nihad’s breathing quickens as she describes “that black morning” when 28 members of her family and others in her village fell into the hands of Isis. At 15, Nihad became one of the thousands of victims in the largest single mass kidnap of women and girls this century.

“They killed men,” says Nihad. “They didn’t want the older women so they either killed them on the spot or chased them out of their homes. They kidnapped us girls, raped us, and took our babies.” The Yazidi community has been specifically targeted by Isis. In 2014 an estimated 5,000 were taken; 3,500 are thought to be still missing.

Nihad was sold as a sex slave to an Isis fighter. “I was raped and beaten continuously for two weeks,” she says describing the beginning of her 15 months in captivity. “They took us first to Syria and then back to Mosul in Iraq.” She met many other Yazidi girls along the way who spoke of the relentless forced movement, as they were endlessly sold and resold, back and forth between Iraq and Syria. Sometimes they were sent as “gifts”: “The men think it is fun to exchange women. One girl I met had been resold 15 times.”



“They all had their stories,” says Nihad, who has been brought to London from Iraq by the Amar International Charitable Foundation to highlight the issue of Isis’ treatment of women and girls. Occasionally the girls found brief moments to offer support to each other. “But we had no life. Many are too young to take the beatings and rape,” says Nihad. Some of the sex slaves are reportedly as young as nine.



“There is one story I haven’t been able to forget,” says Nihad. “I met a 12-year-old girl from a village not far from my own. She had been raped so badly she was bleeding a lot. They had to take her to hospital.”



After being regularly abused by her Isis “owner”, Nihad became pregnant and was taken to live with his wife, four children, and another kidnapped Yazidi girl. “I felt like the child I was carrying was a criminal and I tried many times to miscarry,” says Nihad. After giving birth to a boy she was moved to his cousin’s house. “When I refused to marry the boy’s father he told me that he would take the boy from me when he was grown up. It was at that moment that I decided to escape without my son.”



Nihad in Zakho, north-west of Dohuk. Photograph: Amar International Charitable Foundation

To Nihad’s amazement, however, at the house she found the sympathy that enabled her to escape. The wife and a neighbour helped the 16-year-old make the phone call to her family and secure a smuggler. The first thing she wanted to do when she arrived home was hug her mum: “I never thought I would see the day when I was free again.” She is currently living with her parents in one of the refugee camps accommodating the estimated 3.2 million internally displaced people in northern Iraq.

The Amar foundation, however, is keen to emphasise that these hard won escapes to Iraq’s IDP camps is often not the end of the ordeal. Their appeal “Escaping Darkness” aims to raise funds to train mental health care workers to support the girls that come home, and their families. PTSD, depression, panic attacks, nightmares and self harm are common. Some girls have committed suicide. Many return home pregnant, and others struggle with the experience of leaving a child behind. Despite the need, the total number of psychologists in northern Iraq is just 17.



“The experience has changed me completely,” says Nihad. “Even when I’m smiling I’m not really happy. I have lost too many members of my family. The life I had and the good times are gone.”



Speaking at the launch event of the Amar foundation’s appeal, its founder Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne highlighted the need for a holistic approach to providing services for Iraq’s internal refugees that included mental health support: “It is not just a question of surviving. It is about enabling them to live.”



Yet there were also words of caution. “While we need to raise the issue of mental health and refugees, we must be careful of our language,” said Professor Renos Papadopoulos, director of the Centre for Trauma, Asylum and Refugees at Essex University. “Under the emotional pressure of these situations, we tend to use ‘trauma’ indiscriminately to simplify complex experiences. We then arrive at two polarised narratives: refugees are either resilient ‘survivors’ or traumatised ‘victims’. Usually the reality is somewhere in between.”



All Nihad knows is that speaking out about her experience is part therapy, part activism: it is a “relief” to talk about it and she is determined to make people listen. “I want the world to recognise what is happening and take action,” says Nihad. “Girls that are 12 or even younger are being sold, raped and attacked everyday. What else needs to happen before the world does something about it?”



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