September 13, 2014

The Rooms of Horror in Badush Prison

editor:	Murat Suner

Pakhshan Zangana, Head of High Council of Women Affairs of the Kurdish Regional Government, reports that about 700 Kurdish Yazidi women have been kidnapped by ISIS.

Women who have run away from ISIS’s prison and the families of those still held captive have come to Pakhshan Zangana for help. Zangana is trying to bring attention to the women’s plight and plead for intervention on their behalf but fears that her efforts have stalled. “We have women and families calling in every day, the situation is getting desperate,” said Zangana to The Daily Beast. Without outside aid, Zangana has turned to asking for private donations to try to buy the captured Yazidi women back from ISIS before they are sold into sexual slavery.

Mosul’s Badush prison, where the women are enslaved, is used to hold captured women as sex slaves, according to multiple reports, before trafficking them to third parties. Among these women there are also members of other minority groups, like Turkomans and Christians.

A 17 year old Yazidi girl captured by ISIS has revealed to La Repubblica newspaper the extreme abuse she suffers as a sex slave at the hands of the extremists. She describes how the women and girls are kept in three “rooms of horror” where the women are raped, often by different men and throughout the day. “They treat us like slaves. We are always ‘given’ to different men. Some arrive straight from Syria,” she says.

"This is not just a Kurdish or Iraqi problem, this is an international crisis.” Survivors believe that ISIS incorporates fighters from all over the world. “The women calling are telling us that many of these men hail from Chechnya,” others seem to be “British and Dutch nationals”, Zangana told The Daily Beast.

Note: We couldn't find any specific link for donations yet, but we've inquired further information from the High Council of Women Affairs of the Kurdish Regional Government. If you would like to go to their website, please click here.