A Yazidi teenager who was sold into slavery by ISIS but escaped has fled Germany after coming face to face with the man who abused her, The Times reported.

Ashwaq Ta’lo was 15 when her entire family was rounded up in the Isis attack on the traditional heartland of the Yazidi people in northern Iraq four years ago. She was eventually sold along with her sister and other young women and teenage girls, and lived with a man she knew as Abu Humam.

Eventually she contrived to give her captors the slip and made her way to Germany as a refugee, where she was reunited with her mother and several other family members. Then one day in February, she was stopped by a man as she walked home in Stuttgart. “I froze when I looked at his face carefully,” she told Bas News, a Kurdish agency. “It was Abu Humam, with the same scary beard and ugly face. I was speechless when he started speaking in German, asking, ‘You’re Ashwaq, aren’t you?’”

The anniversary of the seizure of Yazidi lands around Mt Sinjar has been marked with anger in the past two weeks. Though the territory has been recaptured, many Yazidis still live in refugee camps in Kurdistan, unable to return to their homes because of feuding between Iraqi and Kurdish factions.

Many Yazidis, particularly young women, are still in Isis captivity, including Ms Ta’lo’s sister. On the day of the Isis attack, Ms Ta’lo was taken with 65 members of her extended family over the nearby border into Syria. Her father, mother and some older and disabled relatives were left behind, and were able to make their way to Mt Sinjar, where thousands of Yazidis camped out until they were rescued.

Five of Ms Ta’lo’s brothers are still missing and her sister is presumed to be still in Isis captivity. The women, she said, were taken back into Iraq and subjected to the well-documented auction of Yazidi women in Mosul. She was bought by Abu Humam, a Syrian Isis guard, for $100.

“We were crying our hearts out, but in vain,” she said. “Later we learnt that the same process was going on in the other rooms as well.”

Ms Ta’lo was taken to Syria and forced to convert to Islam, pray five times every day and begin to memorise the Koran in Arabic, though her own language is Kurdish. “I did all that because he promised not to hurt me,” she said. “But he abused me for more than ten months every single day.”

She eventually escaped, walking for 14 hours to Mt Sinjar, before seeking asylum in Germany. She, her mother and two brothers lived in Stuttgart. She said that during the encounter with her captor he told her: “I am Abu Humam and you were with me for a while in Mosul. And I know where you live, with whom you live, and what you are doing.”

Ms Ta’lo ran and hid before telling her brother, an asylum official and the police about the incident. The police identified the man from the market’s CCTV but told her that there was nothing they could do — he was also a registered refugee. European countries have managed to prosecute Syrian refugees for crimes committed on either side of the Syrian war but compelling evidence can be hard to find.

Now living with her father, Hajj Hamid Ta’lo, in Kurdistan, Ms Ta’lo says she cannot bear the thought of returning to Germany. “I will never go back,” she said.