Tortured, raped and beaten: Former ISIS sex slave on her journey to start of new life in Canada

By the time she was 25 years old, Adiba had been bought and sold six times by Islamic State militants in Iraq. The first was in August 2014.

A month later, she was bought by another ISIS militant who waited just three months before selling her to another man who tortured and raped her. The five months Adiba spent in his captivity was the longest amount of time the Yazidi woman was with any of her captors.

In the approximately nine months that followed, the buy-and-sell scenario was repeated another three times with different men.

Adiba said she felt dead inside every time she was sold like chattel, forced to live in captivity in various houses and apartments throughout the Iraqi city of Mosul.

She was forced to subsist on scrounged garbage scraps, eating off the same floors where she slept. She drank water from toilets.

“They raped me. They beat me. They tortured me,” she said through a translator. Adiba finds it difficult to talk about her past as an ISIS sex slave. But she’s decided to open up about her harrowing experiences in an exclusive interview with CTV News, in the hopes of compelling the Canadian government to do more to help the thousands of Yazidi women and girls still enslaved by ISIS.

In the winter of 2016, after three months as servant and sex slave to an ISIS fighter named Amin, she caught a break.

It was just after lunchtime and Adiba was cleaning while her captor and his family were in another room. She seized on the chance to escape, despite the risk.

“I didn’t care if I got caught. I didn’t care if I lived or if I died,” she recounted.

An hour later, she ran into a local man who was standing outside his home, and begged him for help.

Abu Muhammed, a married family man, agreed to help Adiba. Instead, he took her to an empty house, where he raped her over the course of about a month.

And then he offered her a deal: he would sell her back to her father for US$15,000.

Adiba arranged a phone call between her captor and her father, who managed to raise the money with the help of family, friends and neighbours.

In order to travel to the Kirkuk area, where the exchange would take place, Adiba was given a fake ID with a Muslim name, made to wear a burka and told to claim she was Abu Muhammed’s wife, so that she wouldn’t be questioned along the way.

After making the approximately 180-kilometre journey from Mosul, they met up with Adiba’s father and the ransom was paid.

And in that moment, Adiba said, she felt reborn.

“When I saw my father, I said ‘Thank God. I am free and I won’t see this misery again’.”

Source: CTV News