Freed, Liberated, Catatonic

Souhayla, a 16-year-old girl who escaped the Islamic State after three years of captivity, at her uncle’s home in Shariya Camp, Iraq. Credit Alex Potter for The New York Times

"Very tired", "unconscious", "in severe shock and psychological upset" represented some of the terminology used by a Yazidi gynecologist in diagnosing the behaviour and reaction of Yazidi women in his care who were rescued from captivity by Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant terrorist fighters. The women and girls had been abducted and were abused in a never-ending cycle of violence perpetrated against them as sex slaves.

"We thought the first cases were difficult. But those after the liberation of Mosul, they are very difficult."
Dr. Nagham Nawzat Hasan

Dr Hasan has treated over a thousand rescued Yazidi women and girls, who are in a state of traumatic shock. They sleep for days on end, according to Hussein Qaidi, director of the abductee rescue bureau in Shariya Camp, Iraq. "Ninety percent of the women coming out [of captivity] are like this", explained Mr. Qaidi; 'this' being a state of suspended animation as though suppressing their emotions has deadened them, at least temporarily, to life.

Commonly found in the Sinjar mountains, the Yazidi account for less than two percent of Iraq's population of 38 million Getty

Souhayla is 16 years old. She was 13 when she was abducted, since then she was sold nine times and repeatedly raped by seven different men. Unable to muster the physical resources required to even hold her head upright at her liberation. She needs help to even drink water. Even so it is difficult for her to swallow. She speaks in a voice so faint it is difficult to interpret what she says without placing an ear close to her mouth. Her family has no wish to withhold her identity. Making her name public, they feel will enable people to fully understand the agonizing torture she was forced to endure.

"This is what they (ISIS) have done to our people", her uncle says. Last year the operation to retake Mosul from Islamic State yielded about 180 women, girls and children of the minority Yazidis, captured by the terrorists in 2014. Iraq's Bureau for the Rescue of Abductees verifies the numbers. Those who saw rescue within the first two years of their sex slavery returned home to their ancestral homeland with suicidal thoughts, infections and broken limbs. All of which it is hoped, will heal.

The women who sustained three years of captivity, like Souhayla are seen to be more psychically and physically damaged. They suffer an extraordinary amount of psychological pain and injury. Souhayla's image was posted on Facebook by her uncle, Khalid Taalo, who is attempting to nurse his niece back to some semblance of health. With her image went a description of her dreadful ordeal. Souhayla managed to escape her captor on July 9, two days following an airstrike.

The building where she was kept along with another Yazidi girl saw a wall collapse. While Souhayla survived, the other girl was buried and killed in the rubble. But then so was their captor. Eventually Souhayla was able to make her way through the rubble, and eventually found herself at an Iraqi checkpoint. "I ran to her and she ran to me and we started crying and then we started laughing as well", Mr. Raalo said. "We stayed like that holding each other, and we kept crying and laughing until we fell to the ground."

And then, nothing. She would no longer speak. Reunited with her mother and the rest of her family Souhayla's consciousness evaporated. Antibiotics for a urinary tract infection was prescribed by examining doctors. She was also diagnosed in a state of malnutrition. Two weeks after her return to her family she was finally able to stand for a few minutes, her legs still unsteady.

As for other returnees, some go to extraordinary lengths to try to retain some semblance of human dignity, to defend themselves from their own perceptions of self as irredeemably 'spoiled'; repeatedly raped, their humanity soiled. Yazidi sisters, 20 and 26 drew the attention of camp officials at the Hamam Ali 1 refugee camp, wearing niqabs they refused to go without, as though to hide behind the anonymity of facelessness. Yazidi women never cover their faces ordinarily.

They spoke of their Islamic State rapists as their "husbands", as "martyrs", according to camp official Muntajab Ibraheem, director of the Iraqi Salvation Humanitarian Organization. Holding three toddlers their captivity and constant rapes had produced, they shunned nursing the babies. Camp officials saw no solution other than to complete paperwork to enable the children to become wards of the state.

The liberated women were unable to stand, lying on mattresses inside the plastic walls of the tent in the camp. Those women who attempted desperately to shield themselves from recognition, and who shunned their babies fell into a deep coma-like state from which they occasionally awoke momentarily before falling back to sleep, a sleep that seemed would never conclude. As though they were intent on shielding themselves from reality.

This image taken in August 2014 shows Yazidi people fleeing their homeland in Northern Iraq after the arrival of Islamic State. Thousands of women and girls were captured at the time and used as sex slaves for ISIS soldiers.  AP