A Yazidi man whose wife was kidnapped and tortured as an ISIS sex slave has spoken of how he managed to free her by hiring an assassin to kill her captor.

Huzni Murad’s wife Jilian was taken alongside his sister Nadia, who also escaped and is now fighting for justice alongside Amal Clooney, in 2014 as ISIS attacked their villages in Sinjar, Iraqi Kurdistan, and captured 5,000 women.

The 26-year-old was taken to Mosul where she was held captive by an ISIS fighter, beaten and raped, for 30 months until Huzni, 37, was able to rescue her.

After stealing a mobile phone, she was able to contact Huzni. Having feared her husband may have been among the thousands massacred by ISIS, she burst into tears upon hearing his voice.

‘We were crying and crying, then laughing, then crying. We never thought we would see each other again.

‘I had lost hope, but he told me, ‘You will come back, and you will be loved, and I will be here for you’.’

Huzni hired a hitman to target the ISIS fighter holding Jilian hostage, and the assassin killed him by driving into his car.

The hitman and his associates were then able to smuggle Jilian out of Mosul and eventually back to Huzni.

‘I had lost hope, but he told me, ‘You will come back, and you will be loved, and I will be here for you’.’

Mr Murad’s sister Nadia has since become public face of their people’s suffering, and is now set to marry the man who helped her overcome her ordeal.

Nadia Murad was repeatedly beaten and gang-raped by fanatics after being kidnapped at the age of 21 from her village in northern Iraq in 2014.

But after a daring escape, which saw her leap over the garden wall of her captor’s house in Mosul, she was offered asylum in Germany and has spoken to the UN about her horrifying experiences.

It has now emerged that Ms Murad, who runs a group aiming to rebuild the shattered Sinjar region, is to marry Abid Shamdeen, a former interpreter for the US army.

Shamdeen helped her recover and, taking to Twitter, Ms Murad said of her engagement: ‘Yesterday was a special day for @AbidShamdeen & I. We are very thankful and humbled for all the wishes & support from our family & friends.

‘The struggle of our people brought us together & we will continue this path together. Thank you for your support everyone!’

Shamdeen added: ‘We met during very difficult times in both our lives but we managed to find love while fighting a huge fight.’

Ms Murad, now in her mid 20s, was one of about 7,000 women and girls captured by the hard-line Sunni Muslim fighters who view Yazidis as devil worshippers.

Last year, she shared her harrowing experience of being captured, beaten and sold as a sex slave by ISIS militants in a new book.

In ‘The Last Girl: My Story of Captivity and My Fight Against the Islamic State’, Murad recounted her life in a northern Iraqi village, her brutal captivity, tension-filled escape and feelings of betrayal and abandonment by those who failed to help.

Murad is Yazidi, a religious minority who live in an uneasy existence with their Muslim neighbors.

Yazidi men and older women, including five of her eight brothers and her 61-year-old mother, were killed. The younger women and girls were held in captivity for sex.

‘It never gets easier to tell your story. Each time you speak it, you relive it,’ Murad wrote in her book.

‘[But] my story, told honestly and matter-of-factly, is the best weapon I have against terrorism, and I plan on using it until those terrorists are put on trial.’

United Nations investigators estimate more than 5,000 Yazidis were rounded up and slaughtered in the 2014 attack, and UN experts have said ISIS was committing genocide against the Yazidis in Syria and Iraq.

In September 2016, the UN Security Council approved the creation of an investigative team to collect, preserve and store evidence in Iraq of acts by ISIS.

International human rights lawyer Amal Clooney, wrote the foreword to ‘The Last Girl’, is campaigning for the Islamist group to be prosecuted through the International Criminal Court.

Murad was abducted at age 21 from the village of Kocho near Sinjar, an area that is home to about 400,000 Yazidis.

‘Our Sunni neighbors could have come to us and tried to help,’ she writes. ‘But they didn’t.’

Murad was registered as a slave and even had a photo ID that would be dispersed among the fighters if she were to run away.

Her new owner, a high-ranking ISIS judge named Hajji Salma, told her: ‘You’re my fourth sabiyya (sex slave). The other three are Muslim now. I did that for them. Yazidis are infidels – that’s why we are doing this. It’s to help you.’

Recounting the seemingly endless rapes by men who bought and sold her was clearly difficult for Murad.

‘At some point, there was rape and nothing else. This becomes your normal day,’ she says in the book.

‘You don’t know who is going to open the door next to attack you, just that it will happen and that tomorrow might be worse.’

Murad detailed how she tried to escape by wearing abaya, the robe-like covering that devout Muslim women wear, and crawling out a window.

She was caught by a guard. Hajji Salman whipped her and let his sentry made up of six men gang-rape her until she was unconscious.

Over the next week, she was passed to six other men who raped and beat her, before being given to one who planned on taking her to Syria.

Murad then saw a fleeting opportunity to jump over the garden wall of her captor’s house in Mosul. After wandering the streets cloaked in an abaya, she made a daring decision to knock on the door of a stranger’s house and ask for help.

That was a huge risk, and she later learned her niece, also enslaved, had been turned in six times to ISIS by people she had asked for help.

‘Families in Iraq and Syria led normal lives while we were tortured and raped. They watched us walk through the streets with our captors,’ she writes. ‘They let us scream in the slave market and did nothing.’

Murad was lucky that the strangers she found in Mosul helped smuggle her to a refugee camp.

With the publication of her memoir by Tim Duggan Books, Murad said she wanted to see Yazidis in captivity released, the resettlement of survivors, the removal of landmines in the Sinjar region and prosecution of ISIS extremists.

But more than anything else, she said: ‘I want to be the last girl in the world with a story like mine.’

She now lives in Germany and has become a campaigner on behalf of the Yazidi community. In 2017, she became a UN Goodwill Ambassador for the Dignity of Survivors of Human Trafficking.

Sources:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6089973/Yazidi-husband-reveals-rescued-wife-life-ISIS-sex-slave-hiring-hitman.html

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/isis-sex-slaves-brother-reveals-13122587