Yazidi girls seek healing after ISIS ‘hell’

One eight-year-old was repeatedly sold and raped, while another girl set herself on fire to make herself less attractive to her jihadist captors.

These are only two of the more than 1,400 horror stories German doctor Jan Ilhan Kizilhan has heard first-hand from Yazidi women and girls once enslaved by Islamic State jihadists in Iraq.

“They have been through hell,” he said in an interview in Geneva.

Mr Kizilhan heads a project that has brought 1,100 women and girls to Germany to help heal their deep physical and psychological wounds.

The project, run by German state Baden-Wurttemberg, first began flying in the traumatised victims from northern Iraq last April, and brought the last group over earlier this month. It was in 2014 that authorities in Baden-Wurttemberg decided to act.

At the time, ISIS jihadists were making a lightning advance in northern

Iraq, massacring Yazidis in their villages, forcing tens of thousands to flee and kidnapping thousands of girls and women to force them into sexual slavery.

The United Nations has described the ISIS attack on the Yazidi minority as a possible genocide.

“It is really an urgent situation,” Mr Kizilhan said, calling on other countries and states to follow Baden-Wurttemberg’s example.

The southwest German state budgeted 95 million euros (USD 104 million) to the project and asked Mr Kizilhan and his team to decide which of the victims could benefit most from the move. The doctor said another 1,200 Yazidi women and girls once held by ISIS would also benefit from similar programmes elsewhere — as would the estimated 3,800 believed to remain in captivity, if they make it out.