Teen girls, many of them members of the Yazidi sect in Northern Iraq, are reporting severe mental and physical torture at the hands of Islamic State (ISIS) captors,
the New York Post reports, citing interviews with the Global Post.
The girls, many of whom have escaped their captors, say they were raped, beaten, given little to eat and forced to watch videotaped beheadings. Some were even asked of the severed heads, "Do you know this one?" the Post reported.
The refugee stories offer chilling accounts of the barbarism endured at the hands of the terrorists, who urge captives to convert to Islam or be killed. Some recounted that the did pretend to convert, fearing for not only their own lives but that of their families.
Noted one teen in a Post interview: "There was a big hall with three floors and each floor had five or six rooms. They told us if we didn’t convert to Islam, they would kill all the men in our families, so we said to ourselves, 'It's just words. In our hearts we are still Yazidi.' So I did it to save my brother."
About 5,000 women and another 7,000 men have been logged into a registry by the Yazidi Fraternal Organization, which is keeping track of those who have gone missing,
NBC News reported. Most are thought to have been taken by ISIS in August and are either in captivity or have been killed.
"We would try to make ourselves look ugly," one 15-year-old girl told the Global Post.
"Some women would cry or scream or fight, but it made no difference. They were always taken anyway."
Some of the teens considered suicide and one, she recalled, was successful. Another who tried hanging was stopped and severely beaten for her attempt to end her life, the girl told the Post.
The stories offer a horrifying glimpse into the ongoing ISIS terror.
The Washington Post, in a similar account of the kidnappings, told the story of a 14-year-old girl who said she was offered as a gift to an ISIS commander.
She recalled being separated by the jihadists and driven away with other women and children, listening to gunshots in the distance as men were all killed. Later, they were forced to sleep on the floor and were only fed once a day as they were pressured to convert, the Post reported.
She and another girl were soon handed over to a commander as concubines, although she said she resisted his sexual advances even as he beat her and tried to starve her. Finally, when the girls were left alone in the house, they used knives and meat cleavers to break locks and escape, wearing black abayas to cover themselves until a friend of one of their cousins picked them up, housed them overnight and found a cab driver to take the group two hours to Baghdad. From there, they flew home.
Their harrowing ordeal ended when they finally were reunited with parents. Noted one girl:
"We hugged and kept crying until then I fainted."
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