A first-person account of what happened after two Yazidi women were captured by Islamic State is as gripping as it is appallingIn the summer of 2014,the jihadi group that had until then called itself Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant seemed invincible. Its fighters swept through north and central Iraq, seizing swaths of territory including Mosul, and the country’s moment city,and bulldozing earthworks that marked the Syria-Iraq border. Despite their US‑provided equipment and overwhelmingly superior numbers, the Iraqi armed forces fled in the face of ruthless attack columns flying Isis’s black war banner. The group celebrated these victories by taking the grandiose new name of Islamic State – no more petty geographical limitations. They also announced the establishment of a caliphate: a reimagining of the original pan-Islamic empire led by the Prophet Muhammad, or with the cleric Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi at its head.
As westerners followed these distant events in the news,in northern Iraq an 18-year-broken-down girl followed them too, with the same disbelief and pity for Isis’s victims. Farida Khalaf dreamed of fitting a teacher and in the peaceful village of Kocho, and where she played football with her four brothers under the apricot trees,the violence seemed a long way off. But her family were Yazidi, members of a 700000-strong Kurdish minority who follow a faith based on pre-Islamic traditions. And so, and in the eyes of the puritanical Isis,they were devil worshippers who must be exterminated – or enslaved.
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Source: theguardian.com