She was fourteen when the ISIS terrorist group invaded her village of Hardan, kidnapped women and children, and murdered men. This summer marks ten years since that happened. For the now 24-year-old Kovan Ido Xorto, those were ten years of rape, fear, indoctrination, violence and coercion.
In recent years, since the fall of ISIS in 2019, she was hidden with a family in the camp for ISIS families Al-Hol in Syria. Together with her small son and daughter, who are the result of rape by ISIS men. She has had to convert to Islam and was only allowed to speak Arabic. She was told to use a false name so as not to stand out. Because, so she was led to believe, if she fell into the hands of her people, the Yazidis, she would certainly be killed.
Kovan Ido Xorto was finally found last week when the Syrian-Kurdish authority running the camp conducted a large-scale search operation for weapons and ISIS infiltrators. The camp, home to more than 60,000 people, is notorious for the role of radical ISIS-women who maintain a small caliphate there and organize funding for ISIS through donations from the West.
During the ten-day operation, weapons and ammunition were found, usually buried inside or next to the tents, as well as explosives and even an RPG grenade. Forty ISIS members were arrested, some were hiding in tunnels. Among them was said to be a teacher who has been teaching children in the camp about the radical form of Islam that ISIS adheres to.
Kidnapped
When ISIS invaded Iraq’s Sinjar province in August 2014, it abducted more than 6,400 Yazidis. Over the past years, over 1,200 women, over 300 men, and over 2,000 children have been rescued. Some through rescue operations in the ISIS caliphate, others ransomed by their families, and still others found in Turkey and other neighboring countries. Relatives continue to search for their missing loved ones, sometimes finding them through photos on social media.
Nearly 1,250 women and girls and more than 1,400 men and boys are still missing. Kurdish President Nechirvan Barzani, who has set up a special bureau to find them, has recently sworn again that his office will continue ‘as long as there is one Yazidi kidnapped left’.
‘They destroyed my life. I was sold and bought like a sheep,’ Kovan Ido Xorto said of her years in the caliphate. Like most abducted Yazidi women, she was resold multiple times as a sex slave. At one point, she was with six others in the house of an older man named Abu Jaafar who beat her when she refused to sleep with him.
Al-Hol camp
In recent years, dozens of Yazidi women have been found in Al-Hol camp. This is no easy task, because the ISIS families threaten to kill them or their children if they reveal anything about their real background. Many women have therefore resigned themselves to their fate. It is suspected that there are still tens, possibly hundreds of women hidden in the camp.
To find them, the families in Iraqi Kurdistan send photos of their missing daughters and sisters to the Syrian Kurds, who use those to look for them among the ISIS families in the camp. When they discover someone, Kurdish commandos storm the tent where the missing woman sleeps with the ISIS family at night. So she can then be brought to safety.
Women who are freed after so many years not only have to deal with serious trauma. Most women who are still trapped have children from ISIS men that are not accepted by their own community. Because Iraqi law sees them as Muslim following the religion of the father, but especially because the Yazidi religion does not allow mixed marriages.
Many Yazidi women are therefore forced to give up their children as the only way to be reunited with their families. Others have managed to take the children to Europe where the Yazidi community is somewhat more liberal.
Contact
Kovan Ido Xorto has meanwhile finally after many years spoken on the phone with her family in Iraqi Kurdistan. What happens to her next is unclear; all Yazidi women who leave Al-Hol camp are first accommodated at a special location in Syria for some time to help them acclimatize. But the chance that she can then join her family seems rather slim.
An additional problem is that some 200,000 of the Yezidis who fled Sinjar in 2014 still live in camps in the Kurdistan Region. These camps are not exactly the best place for traumatized women who are also considered as fallen women by part of their own community.
After much ado, a special victim fund has been created by Iraqi law for women like Kovan, which has only paid out benefits to a few hundred survivors in the two years it has existed. And to the dismay of Yazidi activists, an amendment to the law is currently being discussed in the Iraqi parliament whereby the Yazidis would no longer be mentioned as beneficiaries.
This would be done so that Shiite Turkman and Christian victims can also benefit from it, but Yazidis call the law one of the few good things the government has done for them. They see the change as an attack on them. ‘The Iraqi parliament has never met to discuss their rescue (from Al-Hol, JN), they passed a law under pressure, now they want to change that law because they feel Yazidi survivors were unfairly highlighted in the law,’ the complaint goes.
Evacuated
Moreover, it is said that all displaced persons camps in Iraq will be evacuated this coming summer, with no exception made for the Yazidis. What will happen to them is uncertain and many are therefore getting themselves smuggled to Europe. Returning to Sinjar is not an option for most displaced Yazidis.
Seven years after its liberation from ISIS, the provincial capital Sinjar still lies in ruins, and only a few dozens of thousands of Yazidis have returned home. While other Iraqi cities (such as Mosul and Ramadi) have been largely rebuilt after the war against ISIS – with Iraqi money, and especially with foreign aid – there are virtually only private initiatives for the reconstruction in Sinjar.
The city is under the control of Iraqi militias, and regularly comes under Turkish fire because Yazidi brigades with ties to the Turkish-Kurdish PKK have joined them.
As a result of a dispute between Kurds and Baghdad, there is also hardly a functioning government in Sinjar. Those returning after years in the camps end up in a region without a real government where violence is part of daily life.
