One hundred thousand dollars: this is what Khaled Taalou paid to free a dozen relatives kidnapped in Iraq by IS. And the ordeal is not over. Five members of his family are missing, like 2,700 other Yazidis kidnapped by the jihadists.
In August 2014, the Islamic State (IS) group swept over Mount Sinjar, historic home of the Yazidi minority in northern Iraq.
The jihadists see the Yazidis and their monotheistic esoteric religion as “heretics”. Thousands of men from this Kurdophone community are massacred. The women are abducted and sold as “wives” to the jihadists or reduced to sexual slavery, the children enlisted.
The family of Khaled Taalou, 49, will not be spared. His brother, his sister, their spouses and their children are kidnapped. In all, 19 people.
“We borrowed money as we could, here and there, to get them out,” confides this journalist and writer with a black mustache and a rough beard in the village of Sharya, in Iraqi Kurdistan.
In exchange for ransom, he succeeded in the space of seven years to free 10 people. The latest is her brother’s granddaughter, in February 2022, found in a camp in Syria.
Releases negotiated at a high price “via networks of traffickers in Iraq and abroad, specialized in this case”, he explains. In total, he says he paid nearly $100,000.
If two relatives were killed in aerial bombardments, five people are missing. “We are still looking. We do not lose hope,” he breathes.
After the rise of IS in 2014, Iraq declared victory over the jihadists in 2017, who then lost their last Syrian stronghold in 2019.
Even today, bodies are exhumed from mass graves in Sinjar. More than 2,700 people are missing, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM).
“Some are still held in captivity by IS. For others, we don’t know where they are,” the UN agency said in a statement.
This is what Bahar Elias is experiencing, whose husband Jassem and son Ahmed are still missing. The family was abducted in August 2014 from Sinjar, but the father and his eldest, aged 19 at the time, were separated from the group.
His relatives having paid 22,000 dollars to intermediaries, Bahar Elias will be released with his three younger brothers. Even today, she hopes for the return of Jassem and Ahmed.
“We have been living in a camp (for displaced persons, editor’s note) for eight years and our eyes are riveted on the road”, says the forty-year-old, living near Sharya, in a camp where dozens of tarpaulin tents are lined up. white and concrete boxes.
“Countries around the world must help us find the trace of our families, to find out if they are dead or alive,” she pleads. “To be free from pain.”
In Iraqi Kurdistan, the Office for the Rescue of Kidnapped Persons, a public administration, is working on this file in cooperation with the UN.
Its director Hussein Qaïdi explains that IS has kidnapped 6,417 Yazidis from Sinjar. More than 3,500 of them have been rescued in Iraq, Syria and neighboring Turkey.
But 2,855 people are still missing, and his teams are working tirelessly to “gather the available information and free all the kidnapped,” he adds.
Hayam has rebuilt his life. She married Marwan, the brother of a Yazidie, Leïla, whom she met in an IS jail. The couple have two children and have requested asylum in Australia, where Hayam’s family awaits them.
The young woman still remembers August 3, 2014, when the jihadists kidnapped her with her parents, five sisters and two brothers. A long ordeal then begins for the 17-year-old teenager through the lands of the “caliphate”: Tal Afar, Badouch and finally Raqa, in Syria, in May 2015.
Hayam and Leïla are sold to a Syrian and an Iraqi in Raqa. Four months later, the Syrian ceded Hayam to a man from Dagestan. His second escape attempt will be successful, ending a year and a half of captivity. She succeeded in reaching Iraqi Kurdistan.
“Nothing awaits us in Sinjar,” says Hayam, sitting in a white dress on a mattress on the floor in her Spartan home in Sharya. “If I go back, there will be neither my friends nor the people I knew,” she continues. “Some were killed, others are still captives of the IS, others have emigrated. Everything has changed.”
On her wrist, she had the word “Huriya”, “Freedom”, tattooed in Arabic.
25/04/2023 05:03:51 – Sharya (Iraq) (AFP) © 2023 AFP
