After being kidnapped by Islamic State militants in Sinjar, Nadya Hesen Hewlo was the mother of two and expecting another baby when she was sold five times to Islamic State members in slave markets. Her new-born baby died of malnutrition and her daughter went missing. Nadya told her story under IS captivity to ANF news.

IS invaded huge territory in Iraq including Sinjar in August 2014. In the following days, IS militants perpetrated the Sinjar massacre, killing 2,000 Yazidi men and taking Yazidi women into slavery, leading to a mass exodus of Yazidi residents. According to a UN report, 5,000 Yazidi civilians were killed during IS' August offensive. Nadya was kidnapped by IS members in a village near Sinjar in August 2014 when IS first killed her mother and father in front of her eyes and took her to Tal Afar and then to Mosul. She gave birth to her baby during this journey.

About 40 days after her abduction, Nadya was taken to Raqqa and sold to a Saudi IS member as a slave. She was forced to work for about two months in severely bad conditions where her new-born son died of malnutrition.

“My son was crying all the time. I couldn’t give him food or milk. One day, that man told me that he is poor and he can’t get milk for the baby. And I asked him ‘so why are you keeping us?’. He didn’t say anything. One morning I woke up and I saw that my son was dead. I hadn’t even named him” Nadya said in an interview at ANF.

Nadya was sold again in a slave market, this time to a Turkish IS member named Abu Yahya. He took Nadya to Aleppo and left her without food or water for three days. She tried to escape but she was caught by other IS members and brought back to the slave market again. This time she was sold to another Saudi IS member Abu Barah who lived in Al-Bab at the time. Abu Barah took Nadya’s daughter Hevi (means hope in Kurdish) and renamed her Esma and sent her to an unknown place.

Nadya didn’t hear about the fate of her daughter after that.

After days of torture and loss of her daughter, Nadya was sold to a Turkmen IS member whose name was Abu Sena. Abu Sena offered Nadya to convert to Islam to be a free woman again. Tired of all the torture and psychological breakdown, Nadya accepted his offer.

Nadya was then taken to Madafi (an Arabic word for guesthouse) where wives of dead IS members and captive women were kept.

“A man named Sheikh was responsible for Madafi. He was holding a big notebook in which he kept all details about the women there, like where we come from, who we are. There were also Sunni and Arab women there. They keep you there until someone buys you” she said.

Nadya told that when a woman refused to leave, she was whipped and taken away by force. She said sometimes women were taken away with their children but, in some cases the children were separated from their mothers and trained by IS.

After 14 months under IS captivity, Nadya was finally able to escape with the help of another Yazidi woman after she was transferred to the Madafi in Manbij.