11

The Beekeeper of Aleppo

Dohuk, Northern Iraq

I had never thought of beekeeping as anything to do with women’s rights or derring-do until I met Abdullah Shrim.

A slight grey-haired man of forty-three in metal-rimmed glasses and crumpled grey suit, he perched owl-like on the edge of the sofa in the dim lounge of the Dilshad Palace hotel, between a garish statue of Long John Silver and a fish tank encrusted with dirt.

Abdullah Shrim and his bees before ISIS (Abdullah Shrim personal collection)

Nothing about his dress or demeanour suggested the word hero. Indeed, he was the sort of person you wouldn’t notice on the street. Yet when I went to camps in northern Iraq in early 2018 to meet Yazidi girls who had managed to escape from their ISIS tormentors, and when I asked who had helped rescue them, one after another said, Shrim.

‘Before ISIS came I was a beekeeper and trader, keeping my hives in Sinjar and selling my honey in Aleppo,’ he told me. ‘Women growing up in these areas don’t have rights – when someone has a son in the Middle East there are parties and songs and people bring sweets, but if it’s a daughter they don’t do anything and when she grows up and gets married she doesn’t have any ideas or opinions, just what her family says.

‘But while I was raising the bees and saw how well their society functioned with a Queen Bee at the centre, I wondered why our world should be different. So I began researching different countries in the world where women are rulers. And when ISIS came and killed and stole our women, I decided to do something.’

Those captured included fifty-six members of his own family. Yet he insisted, ‘It wasn’t because of my family I got involved. It really was because of the bees. Everything was destroyed in Sinjar and now I just have a few hives, but when I am with the bees it lifts my mood.’

The first girl he rescued, back on 27 October 2014, was his niece. ‘She was being held by a man in Raqqa and she called me. I got in touch with some of the traders I used to work with and asked how I could get her out.

‘They told me the only way is through cigarette smugglers. Under ISIS, cigarettes were haram or forbidden but they still wanted them. We Yazidis were also haram to them. So, the traders said, if you want to get them out, you have to do it like cigarettes. But girls will be more expensive.

‘I’d never done anything like this before, never worked with smugglers or crossed borders illegally so I was terrified.’

Through his trading network he found a Kurdish driver in the area of his niece who managed to pick her up at a time her captor was praying and take her to the border. ‘This gave me confidence it could be done,’ he said. By the time I met him, three and a half years later, he had rescued 367 women and girls from the clutches of the Caliphate.

He was helped by the fact that, surprisingly, many of the kidnapped Yazidis had managed to keep their phones and had been able to keep in touch with their families. But over time that changed, said Shrim. ‘Rescues became more complicated as Kurds left ISIS areas and I had to use Arab drivers. They also were charging more, from $1000 to as much as $40,000.

‘For each rescue I develop a plan with my son who is an engineer,’ he explained. ‘In one case where eight Yazidi women and children were in a heavily guarded house, we sent in coffins and a funeral car, pretending two of their children had died and needed to be buried.’

That almost led to disaster when ISIS guards insisted they would go along and dig the graves. ‘I thought the children were going to be buried alive,’ he said. ‘We managed to get them all out when the men went for their tools.’

The hardest part was getting the girls out of the house – if they were caught trying to escape, they would be tortured. Often he rented safe houses where contacts could watch comings and goings, or to which he could move the girls so they would not be passing through checkpoints when the alarm was raised. He even rented a bakery to deliver bread as a way to check if the girls were still in houses.

‘We tried so many things,’ he said. ‘We got women to distribute clothes to other women, as then they could enter the house and see their faces uncovered.’

It was dangerous work. Five men and a young woman working with the network in Syria were executed by ISIS after being caught. Shrim received frequent threats. ‘They sent me a photo of me here in Dohuk to say we can kill you wherever we want. One girl I rescued told me ISIS have your picture and say we’re going to kill him whenever we see him.’

He shrugged. ‘My life is not more important than the tears of my niece or the other girls I have liberated.’

Since the Caliphate started crumbling in 2017 and ISIS lost control of Mosul then Raqqa, it had actually got harder to get girls out, as many had been moved to Turkey where, he said, authorities were refusing to cooperate. Some were thought to have been sold on to prostitution rings in Europe. Shrim believed perhaps a thousand were still alive but many were dead.

The last girl he had freed was another niece, Khitab, abducted when she was only nine. He had got her out just three days before we met, from the northern Syrian city of Idlib where she was being held by Jabhat al-Nusra, the Islamist group affiliated to al Qaeda. ‘She was sold to so many men. She was tortured,’ he says, shaking his head.

He had tried to rescue her before using an ambulance but on the way out they were stopped and Khitab recaptured. ‘They tortured her so many times after that,’ he said.

This time she was being held near Idlib General Hospital so he instructed her to go there when her captor went out for Friday prayers and stand outside holding a white bag. ‘I told her to wait for a man to come and say, “I am Abdullah.”’

He and his wife were waiting in a minibus across the border. He showed me a photograph on his phone of them all happily reunited.

Shrim longed for the days when he and his wife could go back to Sinjar and his quiet life of keeping bees. Throughout our meeting his phone did not stop buzzing. Every time he rescued someone, the families of those still missing would contact him to see if the new arrival had any fresh information about other girls. He kept names and dates and photos of all the girls. ‘I will keep helping to free women and children as long as I can,’ he said.

He was not the only Yazidi who had given up waiting for the world to help and decided to take things into their own hands. There was a kind of underground railroad involving at least three other groups including Shaker Jeffrey, the young Yazidi who had translated for me in Germany.

Another evening I met Khaleel al-Dakhi and his wife, Ameena Saeed. Khaleel was a lawyer and Ameena had been one of two Yazidi MPs in the Iraqi parliament until she quit in protest in 2014 at the failure to protect her people.

They both looked exhausted – not only did they have a young baby, but they were up till late every night trying to track down the missing. Khaleel took three phones from his pocket and laid them on the table.

‘At the beginning we just collected names, ages and villages of the kidnapped,’ he explained. ‘We were a group of volunteers – lawyers, policemen, a member of the Yazidi prince’s family – and our plan was to document who was missing and what we knew about them, because this thing seemed bigger than us and we thought there would be some government somewhere who would help these girls be rescued.

‘We gave the information to the Iraqi government, the Kurdish authorities, embassies, the US military, but no one did anything. After a month we had no answer except for Barzani’s office [the Kurdish Prime Minister] which told us they would provide some funds. So we realised we would have to do it ourselves.’

The couple had then rescued 265 girls though one rescue went tragically awry in May 2015. They were trying to bring out a big group so had to leave one lot of thirteen in a safe house overnight while they escorted out the first group. But the first group got lost trying to walk to a peshmerga checkpoint in the dark, and by the time he got back to the second group, one girl had panicked and left. She was caught by ISIS and told them where the others were. ‘Only one of those has been found,’ said Khaleel. ‘The rest are missing or killed.’

Despite the danger and difficulties, they refused to give up. The couple had two daughters of their own, an eight-year-old and a baby of five months. ‘I have a dream that my daughters be educated and have a future,’ said Khaleel. ‘These families have the same dreams. These girls hadn’t done anything wrong and deserve a future.’

While many saw rescuers like Ameena, Khaleel and Shrim as heroes, comparing them to the underground resistance in the war, others accused them of profiting or argued that the money paid helped finance ISIS. Shrim looked mortified at the idea he might profit and insisted he had never paid ISIS. Instead he asked, ‘If it was your mother or daughter and you could get them back from this horror by paying $10,000 wouldn’t you?’

Among those who owed her life to Shrim was Turko, a feisty woman living with her five children in one of a few tents dotted on a stretch of wasteland outside a Yazidi camp in Khanke, about forty-five minutes from the Kurdish city of Dohuk.

When Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi announced in December 2017 that ISIS had been driven out of Iraq and the war was over, I had presumed that the Yazidis would be returning to their beloved home of Sinjar. Instead, 350,000 of them – about 80 per cent of the population – were still in camps across northern Iraq. It was a bleak life behind a wire fence, muddy fields lined with row after row of white tubular tents that were too cold in the winter and too hot in the summer. Occasionally, one of the stoves would blow over and fire would sweep through, destroying what few possessions they had.

Khanke camp was home to more than 16,000 Yazidis. Turko preferred to live outside, she said, because the camp with all its barbed wire felt like a prison. Her tent was surprisingly cosy, with a double bed, a TV, a gas heater to keep out the chill, and piles of bright pink quilts and cushions – but it was still a tent far from home.

Turko with her twins (Christina Lamb)

She sat on a cushion on the floor, cradling two adorable five-month-old twins, her apple-cheeked face framed by a cascade of glossy auburn hair, and she began her story.

‘My husband and brother had been away working in Kurdistan when ISIS fighters came into our village Herdan in August 2014 and took all us young women. They took me and our three daughters who were then three, six and eight and moved us from place to place.

‘We ended up in Raqqa, captives of a Saudi ISIS commander called Haider who forced the girls to study Koran. He was forcing me to have sex with him, hurting me, and I feared he would do the same to my girls.’

She tried to escape but the house was guarded. ‘He told me, “If you don’t stop trying to run away, I will take your daughters.” Anyone who tried to run away he would electrocute.

‘ISIS was cutting off heads and he made us go and watch, even the children. They would hang the headless corpses for days and we would pass them on the way to the mosque and back.

‘One night when he was forcing himself on me, I told him, “One day you will all be finished.” He threw me and my daughters in a filthy cellar for three months where we could not wash and were given little food.

‘I didn’t care about myself; if it was just me I would have committed suicide,’ she said, crying. ‘But I was with my daughters. When we got out we were in such a bad state they took us to hospital. We had typhoid.’

Later, back with her Saudi captor, Turko concluded there was no hope. ‘All that torture and rape – death was better for us,’ she said. ‘I tried to kill us all, I poured fuel over us and was about to set fire but one of my daughters stopped me.’

Sometime after that, in November 2016, the Saudi was away in Mosul fighting the Iraqi forces which had launched a campaign to recapture the city. ‘He had left me some money for food so I paid a Syrian woman to borrow her ID, put on a niqab like an ISIS wife, then went to an office which had Wi-Fi and sent a WhatsApp to my brother. It was very dangerous. If they’d caught me they would have burnt me alive in a big cage but I was desperate because of my daughters.’

Her brother called Shrim and gave him Turko’s location and personal information such as her date of birth as proof of life. Shrim told him to tell their mother to collect money – $32,000 – for Turko and her daughters from the kidnap office set up by the Kurdish government.

He then put Turko in touch with an Arab smuggler. She explained where the house was, near a downed plane, and when the Saudi usually went out. One day, when an airstrike began, the smuggler told her it was their chance to run.

But her daughters didn’t want to leave. ‘They had been brainwashed, particularly the eldest Rehan,’ she said. ‘On our way to escape she was screaming, “Don’t take us back to the infidels!” They were all angry and complaining we’re not praying or fasting so we won’t go to Paradise.’

Once outside Raqqa, Turko and the girls had to walk for four days, occasionally hiding among reeds to rest, with no food or drink, except once when they came across a water tank. At one point Turko tripped and hurt her ankle so the smuggler carried her. ‘It was very scary, always thinking we would be captured,’ she said.

Finally, they came to a Kurdish village in Kobane in northern Syria and they were safe. ‘I shouted whoo-hoo!’ she laughed. ‘I was super happy.’

The next morning they woke at dawn and prostrated themselves to pray like Muslims. One of the other Yazidis asked, ‘What are you doing? You’re not in the Islamic State anymore!’

‘Look at us!’ said Turko. She showed me a video on her phone of her and her three daughters by a river bank all clad in black hijab.

After two and a half years in captivity, coming back had not been easy. ‘I was so happy to see my husband but also not happy because of what had happened and not knowing if he would accept me,’ she said. ‘It’s been over one year now and still I can’t look at him normally.’

Her daughters were so indoctrinated that they regarded their fellow Yazidis as infidels. ‘The girls are still always talking about religion and think of themselves as Muslims. I told them Muslims are cutting off hands and heads of people and they reply, “They deserve it.” They won’t talk to their uncle or cousins, they say they are infidels.’

Shrim laughed bitterly when I asked him about this. ‘Turko asked me if her husband still prayed – she too was brainwashed.’

He explained that often when the women come back they had been so brainwashed they believed ISIS ruled the world. Some even tried to make contact with their captors.

Like most Yazidi women I spoke to, Turko was terrified of going back to Sinjar. Instead she wanted to leave the country. ‘Just take us out of Iraq because Iraqi people did this to us,’ she pleaded.

It was clear that escaping ISIS was not the end of their problems. Just inside Khanke camp were a few trailers where the Free Yazidi Foundation held yoga and art sessions for women, as well as trauma counselling. A yoga class was underway and I was invited along. Inside, a group of girls was sitting on the floor. Tacked on the walls were drawings of flowers and eyes as well as a pencil sketch of four girls in hijab chained together. Every member of the class, including the instructor Zainab, was a survivor of being kept as a sex slave by ISIS fighters, raped and sold over and over. As Zainab told them to breathe ‘slow and deep’, they squirmed and fidgeted.

I thought it was me putting them off and slipped out. But Yesim Arikut-Treece, a British trauma psychologist working with them, explained that one of the class, Khalida, twenty, had hung herself the previous week.

Suicide was common among the women. Many of the girls were physically damaged by repeated rape. Some couldn’t face going out. A lot of the men had turned to drinking and there were high levels of domestic abuse. Large numbers of Yazidi families were in debt because they borrowed thousands of dollars to rescue daughters – one man I met, Abdullah, had spent $70,000 to recover his seven children.

They could not go home, explained Sevvi Hassan, a woman clad in a gauzy white long-sleeved, long-skirted Puritanical dress that was typical of many older Yazidis. She told me she was forty-five but she looked twenty years older and she had recently come back from Sinjar after trying to return home. ‘Everything was rubble,’ she said. ‘Our house had no door or roof or windows, there was no water or electricity and no people, just ghosts. We’d been well-off with orchards of pomegranates, figs, olives and grapes and ninety sheep and thirty goats but everything was gone.’

Nor was it safe. Different militia contested the area. Worst of all she said, were the dark memories. Her eldest daughter Zeena, a twenty-eight-year-old mother of four, was so traumatised that she poured fuel over herself and set fire. ‘She kept thinking ISIS was coming back to take her again and the children. Only one side of her face remains unscathed.’

Khanke alone had seen four girls commit suicide and thirteen attempts. Pari Ibrahim, the young US-based Yazidi lawyer who started the Free Yazidi Foundation after losing forty members of her own family, told me she’d heard there were around ten Yazidis committing suicide every week.

‘I wanted to open a trauma clinic for the women but I knew this would be a stigma,’ said Pari. ‘In the Middle East people get called crazy if they have mental health problems.’

So she opened a women’s centre which would be a safe space for survivors to meet, and secured funding from Women for Women International, the UN and the British government, to employ a trauma psychologist. The first one was a British grandmother from Dorset called Ginny Dobson. Within the first couple of days she had ninety sessions with women.

Some were reluctant to attend the centre, including Zainab, the freckle-faced strawberry-haired yoga instructor, who had been abducted along with all her five sisters. She was the last one to escape and when she finally got out, the others had been taken to Germany while her parents and brothers were nowhere to be found. ‘I felt like it made no difference to the world if I existed or not,’ she said. But she was persuaded to go along to a graduation ceremony after which she agreed to do an English course then met Ginny. Within months she was transformed, said Pari, ‘from being a woman who sat in an unfinished building all alone to someone shining’.

Pari had warned me before I went that many Yazidis were fed up with telling their stories to journalists who just wanted to know about the horror, like vultures feasting on their misery. They no longer saw the point of talking as international outrage had not translated into rebuilding their homeland or delivering justice for what they suffered. They were particularly upset about a recent BBC documentary where a filmmaker had persuaded one of the rescued girls in Khanke to accompany them to Mosul to find the house where she had been held and repeatedly raped, and then brought her face to face with an ISIS prisoner.

‘Please don’t portray them as sex slaves. They were humans first,’ said Pari.

It was in Khanke where I met Naima, the girl whose name had been drawn out of a bowl and been passed to twelve different men. She wanted to talk for she had fought back.

‘All the time those ISIS men were forcing me to have sex, the hurt and pain made me stronger,’ she said. ‘The choice was death or accept. But I thought one day it will be my turn and they will be in my situation.’

She had just turned eighteen and was at home in Khanesor on 3 August 2014 when the news spread that ISIS had come to Sinjar. ‘Everyone fled to the mountain. But we had no food or water in the mountain, and heard that they were going to block the way into Syria, so we decided to escape before they cut it off.

‘We were two families in two cars – about twenty of us squashed in, my uncle’s family and my parents, my grandmother and my four sisters and five brothers. But when we got to the old American checkpoint at Dugre, two cars were blocking the road, full of ISIS fighters in black with guns. “Give us your gold and girls without headscarves!” they demanded.

‘We were scared then we heard bombing so they made us get back in our cars. There were about thirty cars all crammed with Yazidis like us, but they were being escorted by ISIS pick-ups – two in the beginning, one in the middle and two at the end. We thought about trying to get away and go back to the mountain but we’d heard some people had tried and been shot and killed.

‘We stopped in Shiloh where they separated the men from the women. Then we heard the sound of shooting and some of the women started to scream.

‘I went to look but the men were just sitting. Then they put men and women in separate cars. My mother, brother and sister managed to escape as did my grandmother and another brother as their drivers were Yazidi.

‘I was with my cousin. My little sister Maha, who was six, was crying and went with my eldest brother. They drove us to Sinjar city. On the way we saw terrible things, dead bodies, cars on fire. They took us to an administrative building which was full of girls and women and then brought my little sister there. Around 8 p.m. a mullah came and started reading the Koran and said we will take some photos then you can go home. But they never took us home. I asked, “Where are the men?”

‘For the next twenty days they moved us from one place to another then eventually to Badush prison which was full of women and girls. They stripped us of any jewellery or money. There was almost no food, it was horrible. It smelt of sweat and vomit and menstrual blood. I felt sick. Every day men would come and choose a girl. The first time the men took me, I froze. I did not know what rape was before that day.

‘We could hear bombing coming nearer so they took us to another school then to Qasr al Gharib in Tal Afar, an old Shia village where all the residents had fled, and which they were using for people who had converted. I found my brothers and uncle. They told me that ISIS had put a dagger on one side and a Koran on the other and told them: “If you choose the Koran you convert to Islam and will see your family; if you choose the dagger you will be killed.”

‘We were in that village for four months. They would come and take the women or girls they liked and the boys for slave labour and training. They also took the sheep and goats to Mosul to feed their men.

‘One day a bus came and they took a group of us to Mosul to Galaxy Cinema, a big hall with columns and tiled floors that was used for weddings. At the entrance were lots of men’s sandals. It was like a market of girls. We were separated into ugly and beautiful. We messed up our hair and rubbed dirt and ashes in our faces as it was better not to be beautiful.

‘After a week some men from Raqqa came and took me, my six-year-old sister and our cousin. Once we got there, I was separated from them and put in a house with ten girls all about my age, and lots of children, even a baby, so it was very noisy. One day an Iraqi called Abu Ali came and took me to his house. I was happy to be away from the noise but then he left me in an ISIS training centre full of girls and women.

‘A mullah came and told me to say the Shahadah [the first of the five pillars of Islam] to prove I had converted. I started saying, “There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his messenger …” but he pulled out his gun. “Please kill me,” I begged, “because then I will be free.” I was happy because I thought this would be the end of all this. But he said, “As you have converted, no one can hurt you.” Then he told me to go and wash myself. After that they took the group of us to Mosul. That’s when they put our names in the bottle and started the selling on.’

It was when she was with her fifth ‘owner’, Faisal the bomb maker, that she decided to fight back.

‘One day he told me “You are a bitch.” I asked him, “Do you know the meaning of bitch? Do you think I’m doing something I like?”

‘The day he sold me to Abu Badr, he told me, “Make yourself ready and walk slowly in case you fall.” I said, “How I walk is not your business.” It was the last day of December 2015 and it was cold and wet and he went outside without shoes. I walked to the car then I went back to him and said, “Faisal, one day you’re going to be punished for what you have done.” As the car left, he started to cry and I felt happy. He might have the guns but he was crying, not me.

‘I was with Abu Badr for twenty-four days. He raped me of course. I was sold many times but the worst experience was with this man because he told me the wife of his friend Abu Sahib was sick and he was taking me to her. But when we got to Abu Sahib’s place, there was nothing wrong with his wife. They put me in a room and that night Abu Sahib came to me. I told him, “I am not yours, I am Abu Badr’s.” I belonged to Abu Badr and it was haram for anyone else to touch me. He tried to force himself on me but I was shouting and screaming and eventually his wife came.

‘The next morning he took me to another ISIS centre and raped me there. I was kept in that centre under guard and in the afternoon Abu Badr came. I asked him if he had sold me but he said no, so I told him what Abu Sahib had done.

‘Then Abu Sahib came back and said he was taking me. I refused, saying Abu Badr hasn’t sold me, and started shouting. He told me to be quiet but I said no, I want everyone to know. “You ISIS say you bring Islam but what you are doing is against Islam, you don’t even obey your own rules and you even rape pregnant women.”

‘He tried to force me but I had a knife I’d managed to get from his kitchen. The guard came and took it then they locked me in. I punched the window to break the glass and tried to slash my wrists to kill myself but then the guard came and took the glass.

‘Eventually after twenty-four days I was sold again, for $10,200 to Abu Haman whose real name was Ahmed Hasoum, and was another specialist in bombs and explosives. I was with him for eight months in Mosul in a place near the famous restaurant Jendul.

‘I was a slave but had some control,’ she continued. ‘Once I made an emir cry. One of my friends was with him. She had two kids and the man wasn’t bringing any food. Those boys when they saw food on TV, they’d cry, “Mum, we need this.” For a month we had no tea or cooking oil and for one whole week just stale bread.

‘Then this emir Abu Walid came and was sitting on the sofa, his big body all spread out like they did, and when I asked, “Why don’t you bring food? The restaurant is nearby,” he said because you are just throwing the food away. Then he spat on me. I told him, “Imagine these were your kids pleading for food and you couldn’t give it. If it was the other way round, I wouldn’t put you in this situation.” Then I said, “Come with me,” and held his hand and showed him we are eating this dry, very hard bread.

‘He started to cry, then came back with cakes and biscuits. That made me happy, that I made an emir cry. They did a lot of bad things to me but when I could make myself the hero of the situation I felt happy.’

I wondered if her family had tried to rescue her using Shrim or one of the others. ‘They didn’t know where I was,’ she said. ‘Once I managed to get the phone and call my father and was speaking Kurdish to him but as I was giving the address, the man took the phone from me.’

In October 2016, while she was with Abu Haman in Mosul, western forces started bombing to try and recapture the city from ISIS. ‘It was scary but we knew it meant people outside were trying to do something finally.

‘Then one of Abu Haman’s friends Haudi came and said the house was in danger, it could be bombed any time, so I should go with him. He took me to his house and I stayed there ten days.

‘Abu Haman is dead,’ she said suddenly in English, laughing harshly.

‘He died in the bombing – I was happy he was dead but it turned out he had written a will. It said I should be sold for $6000 and the money go to his family.

‘So I was sold to Abu Ali al-Rashidi and he took me to his house. I was wearing niqab so couldn’t see where we went. I was with him twenty-four hours, he did the same with me, then the next morning at 10 a.m. he took me to the house of his friend Nashwan and said I will leave you here while I go to fight.

‘Then Nashwan came but I knew I didn’t belong to him so I sat far away from him. He said, “Abu Ali didn’t tell you?”

‘“Tell me what?” I asked.

‘He said, “Abu Ali sold you for $5000.”

‘These ISIS were passing us on like sweets, selling us without even telling us. I stayed three months with Nashwan and the same thing. Then he died in the bombing but he had also written a will saying I should be sold and the money go to his family.

‘The bombing was getting more intense but I was happy as they had started to clear ISIS out of the left bank of the Tigris which divides the city. Then they were bombing the bridges so we on the western side were cut off.’

‘Weren’t you scared?’ I asked.

‘No. The bombs didn’t scare me, the only thing that scared me was that if my owner died another one would come and take me. After Nashwan was killed I was sold to Hamad. I with him twelve days then he sold me to a pharmacist. I stayed with him one month, he did the same thing.

‘All the time the bombing was coming closer. He took me to an ISIS family full of ISIS women and girls. They had heard that the Iraqi army would do the same with them as their men did with us Yazidi women and were scared. They told me, “If the Iraq army come and ask you say we are all Yazidi taken by ISIS.” Suddenly everyone wanted to be Yazidi! One even asked me if you have a handsome brother please give him to me. So I realised the tables were turning, they were scared and that was good.

‘Then he sold me again for $5000 to Abdullah whose real name was Tawfiq Hattam al Hossaini, a Sunni from Tal Afar. I was five months with him, he did the same things …’

I was astonished at her recall of all the detail. ‘The one thing I could do was know all their names so what they did would not be forgotten,’ she explained. ‘Now I am out I am writing everything in a book with everyone’s name.’

I couldn’t help wondering how she had avoided getting pregnant in all these three years with all these men.

‘You can say we used a natural way, if you get my meaning,’ she shrugged. ‘Also ISIS didn’t want us to have children. Sometimes they gave girls contraceptives or Egyptian tablets or used condoms though not with me.

‘ISIS forced me to go to doctors twice. I didn’t want to go because I was scared. I was hurting a lot from all the bruising inside. The doctor told me you have a urinary tract infection and strong inflammation inside so don’t let anyone have sex with you for ten days but still they did …

‘Abdullah also died!’ Again she laughed that hollow laugh. ‘He was the last one and after he died I stayed with his sister and brother. Those last six months were very difficult because there was so much bombing in the Old City where we were. The house was hit more than once and some of the family were injured.’

One day in January 2017, Abdullah’s sister gave Naima her phone and asked her to call her father and ask for help. ‘She told me to tell him these people don’t have anything to do with ISIS. Instead I told him, “Forgive me anything I did and if I survive I will come back.”

‘It was the first time I had spoken to anyone from my family for six months. In the whole time of captivity after being separated from my brothers and sister, I had been in touch just four times.

‘One morning we moved to an underground shelter. Bombs were coming one after another and we could hear gunfire, warplanes, every kind of weapon. There were about sixty people, including three old men. One of the old men said, “The Iraqi army are nearby, we will go to them.” ISIS were getting clothes and things ready and also burning anything that identified them as ISIS – photos, IDs, memory sticks, everything …

‘We went out from underground around 7 p.m. on the evening of 3 July. It was a shock, I didn’t recognise anything, I couldn’t see any normal house, everything was destroyed and it was like a mountain of dust.

‘There was bombing going on all the time and we walked for a while and saw some Iraqi army but that area was not completely free from ISIS so they were busy attacking.

‘The Iraqi soldiers were trying to show us the way to go. There was an ISIS fighter with a long beard lying dead, his face covered in dust and blood and I had to jump over him. In my mind I thought maybe he’s still alive and might cut me. But I felt I had to do it. It was a good feeling, I felt stronger after I did it. Seeing their dead bodies was like what they did to us.

‘We walked through the rubble till almost 9 p.m. when we got to a clinic where people who fled were gathering. I had escaped from Abdullah’s sister but was with another family who had a small child who started to cry. I didn’t know if they were an ISIS family or just people from Mosul but I had a bottle of water so I took the baby and gave him some.

‘I told them I am Yazidi and they said, “When we meet Iraqi army, please tell them this family looked after me and are nothing to do with ISIS.” I said okay, then I gave back their baby and ran away.

‘A little further I saw an Iraqi soldier and told him in a whisper, “I’m Yazidi.” He said, “Really?” I said yes. He asked my name. “I’m Naima,” I said.

‘I knew he might think I was just an ISIS wife trying to escape. He put me in a bus of people fleeing the city. Before the bus left, an Iraqi soldier came and asked, “Is Naima here?” He asked for contacts of my family. I gave him my father’s phone number and he called and asked, “Do you have a daughter captured by ISIS?”

‘When my father said yes, he told him, “She is with us and safe,” then gave me the phone. It was the first time I had heard my father’s voice for six months.

‘The bus was full with no space to sit and the Iraqi soldier told a man to give me his seat, saying, “She is Yazidi.” So then I was more precious than them.

‘The people were being taken to a camp for ISIS families but after a while the bus stopped and I was taken to an Iraqi army vehicle to go to a police station.

‘They took me upstairs to the second floor as ISIS wives were being brought there, and they didn’t want me to see them. The Iraqis were taking their gold and IDs and I could hear the women shouting and screaming. What happened to us happened to them. They lost everything just as we had.

‘A woman living nearby came with biscuits and clean clothes for me and offered to let me stay the night at her house near the police station. As we were leaving, they were bringing in some ISIS they had caught, blindfolded and handcuffed, and that made me happy.

‘The next morning at 8 a.m. the kind woman brought me back to the second floor of the police station and told to wait by the door. Eventually, about 8.30 a.m., the door opened and there was my father. He hugged me and started to cry. I was so happy to see him but I didn’t cry or laugh.

‘The police then took my father to a court to sign a paper to say he wouldn’t kill me. They do that with all the Yazidi girls handed over but we didn’t know that and he was very offended. “What are you saying?” he asked. “She’s my daughter and for three years I didn’t see her.”

‘Finally that evening they took us to Akrab checkpoint on the border between Kurdistan and Sinjar, where one of my cousins was waiting with a taxi. We arrived about 6 a.m. It was 6 July 2017. That is the end of the story.’

Naima had told me all this in the trailer. Afterwards she walked me through the camp past rows and rows of white tents to hers with its fridge and pile of quilts, and I could see it wasn’t the end at all.

‘When I came back I found we couldn’t go home but only to this camp and that my family was no longer complete. It’s like you have a garden that’s green and you leave it for a while and come back and it’s brown and dry and dead.

‘I’m here in the tent with my mum, dad, grandmother, two sisters and two brothers (three of my sisters are married so I am the eldest of remaining). My sisters including my little sister Maha, who is nine and a half, were also kidnapped but they were rescued from Raqqa before me. My family had paid to rescue eleven relatives from ISIS including my aunt and her children so now we owe a lot of money.

‘But three of my brothers and my uncle are still missing. We’ve had no news. Last night I saw them in my dreams and they seemed in a very bad situation; they looked so tired. Sometimes I see young men playing football and think it’s my brother.’

She showed me a picture on her phone of brothers and uncle overlaid with images of flowers and a soundtrack of romantic piano. ‘I made a video about them in case anyone has seen them,’ she said.

‘To start with when I came back I stayed in the tent. I didn’t want to go out or meet people. I felt life had stopped. I didn’t talk about what had happened to me to anyone. If I did go out, I just got in arguments. When people asked, “What did they do to you?” I’d shout “What, you don’t know what they did to us?”

‘But I realised life just continues, it doesn’t wait for war to be over, and saw that I had to change for my family’s sake. The missing were my father’s sons before they were my brothers. Someone took me to this Free Yazidi Foundation and they gave me a job teaching health awareness in the camp which helped.’

I asked if she had gone back home to Khanesor at all. She was quiet for a moment. ‘If I went back to Sinjar it would be with a broken heart. I’ve been back twice, once to get my ID, and my father didn’t let me see our home. The second time was with my sister and I saw it. It was very difficult, everything inside destroyed, all the doors and windows broken.’

She looked down at her hands. ‘I want the worst things to happen to the men that did this to me. I want them to die not in a quick or humane way but slowly, slowly, so they know what it’s like to do bad things to people.’

Not far from the camp was a mound on which stood three white conical Yazidi shrines, like pleated skirts, meant to represent the rays of the sun they worship shining down on earth. A group of women in long white dresses gathered there as the real sun went down, watching it become a swollen red orb that dissolved on the horizon beyond the fenced-off tents. With families and communities divided between camps, some Yazidi leaders feared that the community, which dates back to ancient Mesopotamia, might not even survive.

Yazidi shrine near Khanke (Christina Lamb)

The women were praying for missing children. Like Naima’s family, almost every tent I entered in Khanke had relatives missing. Though perhaps two thirds of the 7000 girls abducted had been recovered, there were still 3154 Yazidis missing, many of them women and girls.

It turned out that when the West declared victory against ISIS after driving them out of Mosul and Raqqa in 2017, they had done nothing to rescue the girls. The US-led coalition even allowed a convoy of around 3500 people to escape Raqqa, which included fighters and perhaps their enslaved girls. Later, behind all the wire and sandbag walls and checkpoints in the coalition headquarters in Baghdad, I interviewed the deputy commander, a British major called Felix Gedney, and asked him why. ‘It wasn’t our plan,’ he replied, ‘but the fighting was very intense and our partner forces felt they couldn’t ignore the pleas of local tribal leaders who were very emotive.’

Shrim, the beekeeper, said he and the other rescuers were only getting back about three a month. Not only had the girls become harder to reach, with Turkey refusing to cooperate, but some refused to come back because it would mean leaving their children behind. One of his own nieces was in that situation, having had a baby daughter in captivity. He believed some of the abducted girls had remained inside Mosul or in camps with ISIS supporters because they feared having to give up their children if they come home.

The Yazidi sect is strictly closed, perhaps because there had been so many attempts over the centuries to wipe them out. A child must be born a Yazidi to worship as one, and adults must marry within the religion. Women cannot date outside and, in the past, any sexual contact with a non-believer meant banishment. Many Yazidis repeated to me the story of a Yazidi girl who had fallen in love with a Muslim boy a few years before and was stoned to death.

It had been a remarkable step for the Yazidi spiritual leader Baba Sheikh to proclaim that girls abducted by ISIS were innocent, in fact holier than other girls, and should be welcomed back. What it did not cover was children born from ISIS captors, and so families wouldn’t accept them.

This seemed very harsh so I decided to go to Lalish, the holy valley where he lived and where Yazidis go to be baptised. It is where Yazidis face to pray in the daytime.

It was cold and rainy, the green hills of the Shekhan valley shrouded in tendrils of mist. My guide was a young Yazidi called Bader and we drove in a taxi with a golden peacock angel and two blue-glass evil-eye amulets dangling from the driver’s mirror.

Eventually we came to a checkpoint across a road that led up to a temple with three more of the white cone-shaped towers. We could drive no further. Bader told me to take off my shoes and socks as Lalish must not be contaminated by dirt from outside. It was cold and damp, and it felt odd to start with but the stone was smooth and oddly pleasant on the feet.

We walked past an arcade of shuttered shops and up some steps to a small stone building. A large old woman in a purple velvet dress with a white veil squatted in the doorway under a plastic clock, guarding a pot of what looked like earth.

Asmara and her pot of holy soil (Christina Lamb)

Her name was Asmara and she explained that the pot contained ‘holy soil’ which Yazidis wrap in a small cloth and keep in their pocket or wallet for luck. She had, she said, been there for twenty years, even sleeping there, as she was from a family of pirs or holy people. ‘Only our family can guard this entrance,’ she said proudly. Beyond her, inside the room, I could see a natural spring bubbling behind a brass rail but as a non-Yazidi I was not allowed in.

We heard giggling and crossed to the other side of the road where a group of girls were taking selfies, all in long colourful dresses as if they had raided a dressing-up cupboard. Then we walked through an arch where I was instructed not to step on the doorframe, only over it, and into a courtyard with a fig tree.

A group of men sat round a fire under a canopy. This was where Baba Sheikh held court. Beyond them was a massive marble portal with a black snake carved wriggling up the wall to the right of it. According to Yazidi legend, the snake plugged the hole when Noah’s Ark was leaking and stopped it sinking, so they regard black snakes as sacred and never kill them.

Through the portal, again careful not to step on the sill, we entered a dim room with seven columns, all festooned with brightly coloured silk knots. The columns represent the seven Yazidi angels to whom they believe God entrusted the world after creation, and the knots were apparently for luck. Untying a knot releases the previous pilgrim’s wish so it could be granted, then a new wish could be requested by knotting another ribbon three times.

A cool breeze was coming from some steps down which led to the holy zum zum spring where Yazidis are baptised and which they believe comes from the same source as the one in Mecca. Once again as a non-Yazidi I wasn’t allowed, so I headed the other way to the main chamber with a very high ceiling, for this was the tallest dome of the temple. Inside was a stone sarcophagus covered in green velvet cloth, the burial place of Sheikh Adi Musafir, one of the founders of the Yazidi faith. Sheikh Adi, who passed away in the twelfth century, was supposed to be the earthly manifestation of the Yazidis’ true ruler, Melek Tawoos, the Peacock Angel. Yazidis told me they believed he comes to Earth every year on a day called Charsema Sor or Red Wednesday, the start of their new year.

Down another set of steps brought us to a room with large amphoras of olive oil from the groves of Lalish stacked along the walls. A few Yazidis were taking turns at standing with their backs to a stone pillar and throwing a small silk bundle over their shoulders toward it. Apparently if the cloth landed on top of the pillar, their wish would be granted.

It was frustrating trying to understand the Yazidi faith. Everyone I met seemed to give me a different account of their history. I kept asking Bader questions but he was little help. ‘It’s all stupid, all the leaders are corrupt and just making money from people,’ he said.

I had hoped Baba Sheikh would be able to explain everything but sadly his place under the canopy was empty. He was ill in Germany, said the men round the fire as I warmed my wet feet.

‘The children born in captivity are innocent. Why shouldn’t they be allowed back?’ I asked Murad Ismael, the poetry-loving engineer who founded Yazda, the main activist group for Yazidis.

‘That’s a step too far,’ he explained when we met for coffee in the inappropriately named Classy Hotel in Erbil.

So moved was he by the plight of the abandoned children that he even tried to adopt one, to the horror of his family, as he was unmarried. But when he went to court, he discovered the child was not an orphan at all – the man who had said he was an uncle was the father. He was angry but we both wondered how desperate people must be that they would give away their children in the hope that would mean a better life for them.

Murad had worked as an interpreter for US forces in Iraq after the 2003 invasion, enabling him to get a special visa for America. He had been studying in Houston in August 2014 when he started getting calls from terrified family and friends back in Sinjar telling him that ISIS had invaded.

He began emailing every member of Congress and journalist he could reach with photographs of desperate Yazidi children, as well as videos of people being buried on top of the mountain.

He and a group of fellow Yazidis who had also worked for the US military then flew to Washington to protest outside the White House, but they were moved on to make way for Palestinians. They stayed on, sleeping six to a room in a grimy motel in Maryland, and eventually managed to get a meeting with the State Department Office of International Religious Freedom. There, they told such horrific stories of families killed by ISIS and people starving on the mountain that they reduced Doug Padgett, a six-foot-five-inch former Navy officer, to tears.

Ismael did not expect much. ‘We are a small minority living in another minority in the middle of nowhere,’ he shrugged. He and his Yazidi friends had one advantage, however. Having worked with the US military, they knew how their minds worked and came up with a Three Point Plan: The US must drop food and water on the mountain, then help a Yazidi militia that had been formed in Sinjar. Finally, the Americans would persuade the Iraqi government to track the growing number of Yazidis taken captive by ISIS.

Ismael, who had a master’s degree in geophysics, made maps of Sinjar on which he marked fields and water towers and stuck red octagons to mark ISIS positions and stick figures for fleeing Yazidis.

The group was overjoyed when they managed to persuade President Obama to authorise aid drops and airstrikes in Sinjar, and publicly denounce what was happening to Yazidis as a ‘potential act of genocide’.

This was quickly followed by disillusion when the Americans ignored the rest of their plan and did nothing to prevent the massacre of villagers in Kocho despite their increasingly desperate warnings. Ismael even threatened to set himself on fire in front of the White House, but it was to no avail.

When their money ran out the Yazidis went back to Houston and formed Yazda. The whole experience, he said, made him feel it was no good relying on humanity.

Eventually the Germans took in 1100 women, Canada took around 700 and Australia around 300. French President Emmanuel Macron had promised to take in a hundred families. The UK and US had not taken in a single one of the Yazidi women, something he struggled to understand.

‘Everyone talks about the survivors, and there was lots of media coverage but in reality they don’t get help,’ he said. ‘We had one woman with TB and we couldn’t even get her the $700 she needed for surgery.’

Sinjar remained in ruins, and it seemed no one was prepared to rebuild it. ‘Being in the camps is destroying the fabric of the community,’ said Ismael. ‘My main fear is we have something like Palestinian refugee camps that will be here forever and people will have a sub-life.’

That was not all. To his frustration not a single perpetrator had been brought to justice and none of the mass graves exhumed. ‘We’ve recorded more than 1400 short testimonies from women and more than 300 lengthy statements,’ he said. ‘We have lists of names of ISIS militants and databases if someone would take it.’

Meanwhile, thousands of ISIS captors were still at large, according to Khaleel, the lawyer turned rescuer. ‘I got out one girl, Rana, aged fifteen who had been sold and resold thirteen times, and she went to Mosul to get her identity papers and saw the last man who had been holding her just walking in the street. She shouted but he covered his face and ran away.’

He and Ameena had started trying to track down some of the perpetrators themselves. One of the girls they had rescued that January was a twenty-year-old called Bushra. She had been sold on and on and her last captor had been a seventy-year-old man in Deir Azzour.

Once she was safely back, Khaleel created a fake Facebook identity to contact the man, offering to help get her back. Bushra recorded a voice message to send him, saying that if he came to get her, she would go back with him.

The man took the bait. Khaleel showed me a video of an old man with a grey beard crying into an olive tree and begging, ‘Please come back, I miss you!’

‘We have managed to catch a lot of ISIS people like this,’ he said.

But Ameena had started to wonder if there was any point. ‘I don’t feel optimistic about getting justice,’ she said. ‘Our own government doesn’t support us, the Iraqi government doesn’t help, lots of ISIS leaders are paying and going free. Seventy-three mass graves of Yazidis have been found and no one is investigating or protecting them.’