Hear Her Cries

IRAQ AND SYRIA CASE STUDIES

RITA HABIB

Rita went to Turkey to try to register herself and her widowed father for asylum as Daesh (ISIS) swept across Iraq in 2014. 60 On August 6 th , she returned to Qaraqosh with the approvals she needed. 61

She tried to reach her father, who is partially sighted, and fought her way through refugees going in the opposite direction. The same night she arrived in Qaraqosh, the Peshmerga Àghters protecting the town withdrew. She awoke to the sight of Daesh’s black Áags in the streets. 62 She, and others, were ordered, on the pain of death, to gather in the square. The Daesh Àghters separated them into older people, young men, young women and children. Rita’s group was taken to Mosul and told they were going to be part of a prisoner exchange. “You are the spoils of war, you and the Yazidis alike,” Daesh members told Rita. She thought that as a Christian she would be afforded protection as “people of the book” are supposedly treated better under Daesh’s ideology. 63 Rita was Àrst bought by an Iraqi from Mosul and stayed with him for a year and a half. 64 Rita said: “In the hospital in Mosul, we women were subjected to the most degrading abuse. Three children from my people were with me, and I witnessed them being sold to emirs in Mosul. I was sold to [Emir] Abu Mus’ab al-Iraqi. In his home, there was also a Yazidi girl from Sinjar named Shata…she was only 14 years old. He raped the both of us over and over again.” 65 Rita added: “We were raped and tortured.” 66

Rita and the young Yazidi girl, Shata, were also tortured psychologically by the emir. She said: “He made us watch videos with terrorists slaughtering non-Muslims. In one of them, they were beheading Shata’s brother.” 67 Rita was moved to Raqqa before being sold to a Saudi Arabian named Abu Khalid al-Saudi. She explained: “Abu Khalid was married to a woman from Morocco. I was beaten and tortured by her every day. She would not give up until I was bleeding, from my head, for example. They made me read the Qur’an and threatened to kill me if I did not convert to Islam.” 68

Forced to clean and tidy the house, Rita said: “The wife would just shout, abed [slave] or kaÀr to summon me.” 69

Next, Rita lived with a Syrian in Abu Kamal on the Iraqi- Syrian border. She was there for a year and four months until she was moved to a village outside of Deir ez-Zur. It was there that members of the Shlama Foundation, a group funded by the Assyrian and Chaldean diaspora, posed as jihadists and bought her freedom. She said: “I am very happy that after three years I reunited with my father. It is a joyous moment because he is the only family I have left.” 70

18 | HEAR HER CRIES