Sex slavery pushing Iraq ISIS victims to suicide

The Islamic State jihadist group has abducted women and children from Iraq’s Yazidi minority, distributed them as spoils of war and forced them into sexual slavery, driving some to suicide.

ISIS militants have overrun swathes of Iraq since June, declared a cross-border caliphate also encompassing parts of neighbouring Syria and carried out a litany of abuses in both countries.

The group has targeted Yazidis and other minorities in northern Iraq in a campaign that rights group Amnesty International said Tuesday amounted to ethnic cleansing, murdering civilians and enslaving others for a fate that some captives consider worse than death. 

”Many of those held as sexual slaves are children - girls aged 14, 15 or even younger,” Donatella Rovera, Amnesty’s senior crisis response adviser, who interviewed dozens of former captives, said in a statement.

Amnesty said that many of the perpetrators are IS fighters, but may also include supporters of the group.A 19-year-old named Jilan committed suicide out of fear she would be raped, Amnesty quoted her brother as saying.

A girl who was held with her but later escaped confirmed the account, saying: “One day we were given clothes that looked like dance costumes and were told to bathe and wear those clothes. Jilan killed herself in the bathroom. She cut her wrists and hanged herself. She was very beautiful; I think she knew she was going to be taken away by a man and that is why she killed herself.”