She was held captive among 227 other women and young girls from the Yazidi religious minority. PHOTO: REUTERS
Held captive among 227 other women and young girls from the Yazidi religious minority, she was released from Kirkuk in northern Iraq last week.
PHOTO: ASSOCIATED PRESS
They were captured last June and finally crossed into Kurdistan on Wednesday.
Read: US man accused of trying to support Islamic State
The mass release of the Yazidis, kidnapped in Nineveh last year, is the second of its kind, after some 200 mainly elderly people were set free in January.
A sweeping IS offensive overran large areas north and west of Baghdad last June. A second drive in August targeted areas in the north that were home to many of Iraq’s minorities.
The group, that crossed back to safety on Wednesday, including many elderly and disabled people, was driven back to the Kurdish city of Dohuk after a stop in the Yazidi holy town of Lalish.
Several told stories about the day when their homeland was attacked and how they were forced to convert to Islam.
PHOTO: EPA
A 25-year-old woman with a disability in her left leg gave a recount of how she was separated from her seven-year-old daughter during her captivity.
Read: Mother of two abandons husband to join Islamic State
"They told me to leave with those old people but I refused to leave without both my children,’ she said, cradling a two-year-old in her lap.
After insisting and paying IS militants $20,000, she eventually got her daughter back.
Ahlam Qassem has six children but only left with the three youngest. Her two teenage daughters and 10-year-old boy stayed behind.
"I asked them many times to return my children, they took them from my arms and refused to bring them back. I don’t know their fate," the 35-year-old mother said.
PHOTO: ASSOCIATED PRESS
The Yazidis, who are neither Muslims nor Arabs are considered infidels by IS militants.
They looked in danger of being wiped out of their ancestral land until a US-led air campaign turned the tide on IS advances in northern Iraq.
The UN has said the IS campaign of killings, abductions and rape against Yazidis may amount to genocide.
This article originally appeared on Metro.co.uk
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