She set herself on fire to avoid becoming ISIS sex slave

She set herself on fire to avoid becoming ISIS sex slave

By Mark Ellis, Senior Correspondent for ASSIST News Service

GERMANY (ANS -- September 8, 2016) -- Facing the prospect of continued rape and abuse by ISIS fighters after her capture, a 17-year-old Yazidi girl named Yasmin decided she would make herself unattractive to her captors.

Completely hopeless and distraught, she poured gasoline on herself and then lit a match. The flames scorched her hair, nose, lips and ears and disfigured her once beautiful face before they were extinguished.

“I couldn’t take it anymore and this is what happened to me,” she says.

When German doctor Jan Ilhan Kizilhan found her in 2015, he was shaken by her physical appearance and emotional scars. At first she resisted his efforts to help her, thinking he might be linked to her former captors, according to a report by The Sun.

Yasmin is part of a group of 1,100 women, mainly from the Yazidi religious communities, who escaped ISIS captivity and were sent to Germany for psychological treatment.

In August, 2014, ISIS fighters swept through the area where Yasmin lived. They rounded up the Yazidis into three groups: boys were forced into waging jihad for ISIS, older men were killed if they didn’t convert to Islam, and women and girls sold into sex slavery, according to The Sun.

Thousands of Yazidis attempted to take refuge on a local mountaintop, but the Islamist radicals surrounded them.

The US and its allies flew in humanitarian relief supplies, but many Yazidis died before they could be rescued.

Following the vicious onslaught, no free Yazidis remained in the Sinjar region. A population that once numbered 400,000 had all been displaced, captured or killed, according to The Sun.

As many as 3,200 are still held by ISIS in Syria, where they were taken after their capture.

“It was an evil that I had never seen in my life,” says German doctor Jan Ilhan Kizilhan. “I’m experienced in trauma, I had already worked with patients from Rwanda, from Bosnia, but this was very different.

“If you have an 8-year-old girl in front of you and she’s saying she was sold eight times by ISIS and raped 100 times during 10 months, how can humankind be so evil?”

Photo captions: 1) Yasmin in her room. 2) A Yazidi mother flees from ISIS with her children. 3) A recent TV taping of "Windows on the World, with left to right: Edward Wooding, Mark Ellis, Andrew Wooding and Dan Wooding.

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About the writer: Mark Ellis is Senior Correspondent for the ASSIST News Service (www.assistnews.net), and also the founder of www.GodReports.com,  a website that shares testimonies and videos from the church around the world to build interest and involvement in world missions. Mark is also co-host with ANS founder, Dan Wooding, of "Windows on the World," a weekly TV show broadcast on the Holy Spirit Broadcasting Network (http://hsbn.tv), that features the top stories of the week on the ASSIST News Service.

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