Farida Abbas Khalaf, one of thousands of Yazidi women abducted, raped
and brutalised by Islamic State group fighters, says the jihadists'
departure has not made it safe to return to Iraq.
"Everything is still the same. The same people who joined (IS) are still in those neighbourhoods. How can we return and trust them again?" Khalaf said in an interview with AFP this week.
"Who will guarantee that genocide will not happen again, by perpetrators using another name?" she asked, speaking through a translator.
Khalaf was 18 when IS fighters arrived in her once peaceful village of Kocho in Iraq's northern Sinjar region on August 3, 2014.
Speaking on the sidelines of a summit for human rights defenders in Geneva, the young woman with long black hair and sorrowful eyes said she and her family never expected to be attacked.
"We hadn't harmed anybody, we hadn't offended anybody... We just wanted to live in peace," she said.
But the Kurdish-speaking Yazidis, who follow a non-Muslim faith, became particular targets of hatred for the Sunni Muslim IS extremists that seized Sinjar in 2014 and unleashed a brutal campaign against the minority that the United Nations has called a "genocide".
When IS jihadists descended on the village, they gave the Yazidis two weeks to convert to Islam -- or risk the consequences.
Khalaf, who has written a book about her experience titled: "The Girl Who Beat ISIS", described what happened when those two weeks were up.
- Taken to slave market -
"They gathered all of us in the village and they asked us to convert. We refused, and they started killing the men," she told AFP.
"That one day alone they killed more than 450 men and boys."
Khalaf's father and one of her brothers were among those killed, and she was abducted.
"When we were taken, they did everything to us. They raped women and girls as young as eight," she said.
Khalaf was taken to one of IS's infamous slave markets, where Yazidi women and girls were sold and traded as sex slaves across the jihadists' self-proclaimed and since-crumbled "caliphate" in Syria and Iraq.
Continued
"Everything is still the same. The same people who joined (IS) are still in those neighbourhoods. How can we return and trust them again?" Khalaf said in an interview with AFP this week.
"Who will guarantee that genocide will not happen again, by perpetrators using another name?" she asked, speaking through a translator.
Khalaf was 18 when IS fighters arrived in her once peaceful village of Kocho in Iraq's northern Sinjar region on August 3, 2014.
Speaking on the sidelines of a summit for human rights defenders in Geneva, the young woman with long black hair and sorrowful eyes said she and her family never expected to be attacked.
"We hadn't harmed anybody, we hadn't offended anybody... We just wanted to live in peace," she said.
But the Kurdish-speaking Yazidis, who follow a non-Muslim faith, became particular targets of hatred for the Sunni Muslim IS extremists that seized Sinjar in 2014 and unleashed a brutal campaign against the minority that the United Nations has called a "genocide".
When IS jihadists descended on the village, they gave the Yazidis two weeks to convert to Islam -- or risk the consequences.
Khalaf, who has written a book about her experience titled: "The Girl Who Beat ISIS", described what happened when those two weeks were up.
- Taken to slave market -
"They gathered all of us in the village and they asked us to convert. We refused, and they started killing the men," she told AFP.
"That one day alone they killed more than 450 men and boys."
Khalaf's father and one of her brothers were among those killed, and she was abducted.
"When we were taken, they did everything to us. They raped women and girls as young as eight," she said.
Khalaf was taken to one of IS's infamous slave markets, where Yazidi women and girls were sold and traded as sex slaves across the jihadists' self-proclaimed and since-crumbled "caliphate" in Syria and Iraq.
Continued
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