Mayada escaped sexual slavery at 14, but there are still hundreds of others held captive today
Forced into sexual slavery at age 11, Mayada was sold seven times before she escaped ISIS and rebuilt her life in Australia. There are still 2,600 other women and girls missing in captivity today and their families want justice.
When the great biblical flood came, an ancient legend has it that Noah’s Ark was swept onto the highest peak of the Sinjar mountains in what is, today, northern Iraq.
For at least 3,000 years, this semi-desert range has been revered by a secretive community that has repeatedly faced false accusations of “devil worship” by those who mean to destroy it.
Warning: This story contains descriptions of genocide and child sex trafficking.
The Yazidis of Sinjar were a tight-knit group of mostly farmers, tradesmen, housewives and schoolchildren, before their lives were up-ended in the first weeks of August 2014.
Among them was 11-year-old Mayada who recalls the day her village was decimated had started like any other.
“I was having lunch with my family when someone knocked on the door and told us to get out or they would shoot us all,” she says.
“They made everyone in our village go to the school. Then, they separated the men from the women and put them in cars. That’s when we heard gunshots and everyone started screaming and crying.”
Mayada was enslaved for three years after she was ripped from her mother and her father was killed.
ABC News: Leah White
Mayada’s birthplace, Kocho, was the last of the villages sprawled around the Sinjar mountains to be captured and destroyed by the Islamist terrorist group ISIS in a matter of days.
The armed fighters had taken control of increasingly large areas of Iraq and neighbouring Syria in the months prior to their siege of Yazidis. They held them in contempt for practising a mystical, non-Muslim faith.
“I was too scared to talk,” Mayada says of the moment when her own father was shot. The then-11-year-old, and her two younger brothers and sister, clung to their mother as she wept.
In the days that followed, the older women of the village were also killed, while Mayada’s brothers and other boys were ripped from their mothers to be converted to Islam and trained as ISIS fighters.
The only people who remained were the younger women and girls. They were moved to Syria where, unknown to them, ISIS was gathering the captives it planned on forcing into sexual slavery.
“They were putting sedatives in our water so that we don’t cry or try to run. So everyone was just sleeping and sleeping,” Mayada says. “Then, one day, a man came and dragged me by my hair to a bus.”
As Mayada caught sight of her mother and sister for the last time, she steeled herself for what was to come. At the same time, another kind of horror was unfolding for nine-year-old Rana.
She lived in one of the first villages ISIS attacked on August 3, 2014, which sat closer to the town of Sinjar at the base of the mountains.
This proximity gave her family — and tens of thousands of others — a way of escaping to higher ground. But what is a sacred place for them turned into an open-air prison.
“We were trapped in the mountains for 12 days,” Rana says. “Some people were captured and killed, and others died because there was no food or water — and it was really, really hot.”
Many of the elderly and frail could not complete the steep climb, which forced their loved ones to choose between abandoning them or dying together from exposure.
“There were times when my younger brother would collapse and we thought he would die,” Rana says. “We had to drink dirt water, it was brown and had worms in it.
“Some of the sheep and other farm animals died, so we would eat their raw skin and meat. It was really gross but we had to survive.”
Relief eventually came in the form of airdrops from Australian forces and other Western powers, whilst a humanitarian corridor was opened to allow them to escape the mountains to safety.
But for Mayada and the 6,000 others enslaved to finance terrorism and lure ISIS recruits, there were no military operations to rescue them, security sources and advocates say.
Over 2,600 of them are still missing ten years on, with many thought to have been kept in captivity, according to the global non-profit Yazda.
Despite losing control of most of its territory from 2017, ISIS continues to operate in scattered pockets of land and underground cells, according to the US Central Intelligence Agency.
Yazidis are a distinct religious group who have been persecuted for generations for their mystical beliefs.
Getty
The United Nations (UN) and Australia point to the atrocities Mayada and Rana endured as evidence of a deliberate intent to destroy this distinct group of people known as Yazidis.
Little is publicly known about the origins of this ancient religious community, which relies on oral traditions and shares elements of Christianity, Judaism and Islam.
While Yazidis are traditionally secretive, it’s widely understood they believe in one God who created the world and entrusted its care to seven angels, including the most senior Peacock Angel or Melek Taus.
An estimated 5,000 Yazidis were killed during ISIS’ genocidal campaign and countless others were forced to convert to Islam.
To date, only 10 ISIS fighters have been convicted internationally for crimes against Yazidis — and advocates are urging Australia to do its part in bringing to justice Australian perpetrators.
It comes as the UN renews calls for national courts to end ISIS’ impunity.
The value of a slave
Mayada doesn’t know what price she fetched but she remembers her first captor was a senior ISIS fighter who held nine other girls at the same time.
“He was older than my dad,” she says. “I was 12 years old the first time he raped me … he made my life hell.”
According to a security expert, Yazidi sex slaves were as strategically valuable as the terrorist group’s oil reserves in helping it maintain its so-called “Islamic State” when it held territory.
“Some of these women have spoken about having price tags attached to their bodies,” says Susan Hutchinson, a researcher at the Australian National University, who was in the Australian Army for eight years.
“Everything that’s involved in the moving of commodities was used to move and sell these women. So there were warehouses and ledgers, and receipts were handed over between purchases.”
Data she analysed from ISIS defectors reveal the average price for Yazidi women and girls ranged from $US1,000 to $US3,000 per person, with prices fluctuating according to market conditions.
Some women were sold for as little as $US20 ($32), while others fetched as much as $US25,000 ($40,000), according to UN reports.
“I don’t know what’s worse: these women going for absurdly low prices or absurdly high prices,” Hutchinson says.
In a peer-reviewed study, she estimates this market in sexual slavery may have generated up to $US111 million ($177 million) in profits for ISIS.
According to UN reports, the promise of sexual rewards was also effective in recruiting fighters, particularly young men who were seeking status and access to sex in socially conservative settings.
“It seems that senior leaders of ISIS were given first choice of slaves, while those remaining could be sold for very high prices to foreigners overseas,” Hutchinson says.
“Remaining slaves were then offered for sale locally to ISIS fighters at a lower price. Younger women and girls fetched the highest prices, and it was higher still for virgins, or those thought to be beautiful.”
For Mayada, it meant she was brutalised and raped, over and over again, by seven men over three years — the majority of it before she had reached puberty.
The continuous abuse unfolded in the midst of further violence as ISIS fought local factions and international forces over territory.
“Sometimes, we [the Yazidi girls] would just sit in a room because we kept hearing gunshots and bombs falling around us,” Mayada says. “The doors were locked so we couldn’t get out.”
Still, there were moments of reprieve, when the girls would find ways of occupying their time in the guarded houses they could never leave.
“We would play hide-and-seek, or put our mattresses on the stairs and push each other down like it was a slide.”
Escaping a life of ‘hell’
Despite five previously foiled attempts at escape, 14-year-old Mayada remained determined as ever to secure her freedom.
One night, while her seventh captor slept, she and two other Yazidi girls gained access to his Facebook account on a laptop and contacted one of her uncles.
He put them in touch with a clandestine network of rescuers to organise an extraction plan, before Mayada wiped all the messages from the account.
The three girls had to act quickly and make their own way to a safe house on foot, while disguised as ISIS brides under full-body robes and veils.
“I was terrified,” Mayada says. “The man was sleeping in the bed as I was getting ready — I thought, this time, he’ll kill me for sure if he catches me.”
The girls walked for hours before arriving at the secret location where they were hidden away until two men came to take them on the dangerous journey out of ISIS-controlled territory.
Under the cover of darkness, they rode on the back of motorcycles for several hours, before completing the rest of the journey on foot to get around landmines.
“The first time they brought me back to Sinjar, I was sad because my mum wasn’t there, but I was happy as well because I finally — finally — had made it,” Mayada says.
“And when my uncle and his family came, oh my God, that was such a moment. Everyone was crying, everyone was so happy. It was incredible.”
Despite her ordeal, Mayada is considered one of the lucky ones, as Hutchinson says some Yazidi families have been left with no other option but to buy back the women and girls who remain missing.
“Some of these survivors have ended up all over the region from Saudi Arabia to Türkiye, and largely, most of the women who have been freed were bought back,” the security expert says.
“It’s just not fair that Yazidi families are having to fund that themselves.”
With more than 200 Australians known to have travelled to Syria and Iraq to join ISIS, Hutchinson says Australia must investigate and prosecute its own perpetrators for crimes against Yazidis.
In particular, she says the National Action Plan on Women, Peace and Security obliges Australia to support justice efforts for sexual violence crimes against Yazidi women and girls.
“Many of Australia’s foreign fighters might be dead, but not all. Yazidi survivors deserve justice for what they suffered,” Hutchinson says. “Justice delayed is justice denied.”
Germany, Netherlands and Sweden are the only international countries to have prosecuted ISIS members so far, with just ten of the 30,000-odd foreign fighters convicted.
“The international community’s inaction has left these victims abandoned, while their families continue to suffer from unresolved grief and trauma,” Yazda says in its latest report.
“This meagre smattering of cases is insufficient, especially as ISIS members travelled from over 80 countries.”
Where are Yazidis now?
A decade on from the 2014 genocide, there are more than 400,000 survivors trying to recover and rebuild their lives.
But over 200,000 of them are still weathering life inside displacement camps in Iraq, according to the International Organisation for Migration.
The others have fled the country, resettling mostly in Europe, North America, and, more recently, Australia.
The 2021 census revealed there are at least 4,123 Yazidis who now call regional Australian towns their home. Most of them speak Kurmanji Kurdish, while a small minority speak Arabic.
The top five Yazidi settlements in Australia
After five years of living in camps, Rana and her family joined Australia’s largest Yazidi community in Toowoomba, south-east Queensland.
The now 20-year-old works as a cultural support worker, helping interpret doctor’s visits and therapy sessions for Yazidis who do not speak English.
“It’s really, really difficult to hear all of their stories, but someone has to do it,” Rana says. “So many Yazidis have no family or friends here in Australia, which is so hard for them.”
Despite previously finding it hard to learn English as well, she is currently studying biomedical science with the view of becoming a doctor like her late Uncle Rasho.
“In our village in Sinjar, there was no hospital so he was the only doctor there and he would help us get better. I wanted to do that too.”
Rana and her family continue to celebrate their traditions, like colouring eggshells during the Yazidi New Year, Charshema Sur, in April.
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Mayada has also become a professional interpreter for her community in Coffs Harbour, New South Wales, where she’s flourished as a leader.
The 21-year-old, who has been living with her uncle and his family, finished high school as school captain and volleyball captain.
In an emotional pilgrimage in 2023, Mayada was reunited with her two brothers as she revisited some of Sinjar’s holiest places, including the Lalish temple.
It’s a place where Yazidis gather to renew their community bonds and find strength in their faith.
“I was nervous. As my flight got closer, I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to do this, but then I saw my brothers, and it was such a special moment,” she says.
“I also went back to Kocho to visit my home and my father’s grave. Our houses are all destroyed and there are people buried everywhere, so no one is living there anymore.”
Mayada aspires to become a human rights lawyer to defend other women and girls.
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Rana and Mayada say Yazidis in Australia need more support to understand and navigate the social services and career pathways that are available to them.
But with their extraordinary resilience and compassion, future generations of Yazidis are in good stead.
“I think a lot about finding ways to help my community,” Rana says. “I want to get into medicine so that I can treat people.”
Meanwhile, Mayada wants to become a human rights lawyer to defend other women and girls: “Imagine if someone does to your own mother or sister what they did to me,” she says.
It’s almost as if the two are guided by angels: one daughter to heal lives, and another to bring them justice.
Credits:
Words and production: Audrey Courty
Design and illustrations: Emma Machan
Editing: Leigh Tonkin
Photography: Leah White, Donal Sheil, Getty
