Ashwaq Haji Hamid, a young Iraqi Yazidi woman who was raped by an ISIS militant back in 2014, expressed her relief after hearing the judge's death verdict to her ISIS rapist in the case she raised against him.
Ashwaq Haji Hamid Talo, a 20-year-old Ezidi survivor of Daesh (ISIS) rape, got the justice she was seeking in Baghdad court. The court sentenced him to death by hanging. He was sentenced to death by hanging. She was only 14 when Daesh captured her. #yazidi #sinjar #kurds pic.twitter.com/XFWW1obAkJ
— Afshin Ismaeli (@afshin_ismaeli) March 5, 2020
In 2014, ISIS had taken over Sinjar town, that was mostly inhabited by the Yazidi minority in Iraq, killing many men and enslaving thousands of women and young girls. Ashwaq, who was only 14 years old at the time, was no exception.
Last November, Ashwaq identified Mohammed Rashid Sahab in the court confrontation, that was aired on a local Iraqi TV channel, collapsing in tears as she remembered what she went through.
Ashwaq Haji Hamid was kidnapped and sold into slavery at 14. She later fled to Germany to begin a new life. She was forced to deal with the trauma again when she bumped into her rapist on a street, where he even threatened her by saying he knew where she lived. pic.twitter.com/fiv2hwekrE
— ASPIRING-GENERATION (@AGFNigeria) December 6, 2019
On TV, Sahab admitted raping Ashwaq for 77 days, saying that an ISIS leader "had sent her to him as a gift". In his TV appearance, he didn't show any regrets, insisting that "he couldn't tell if she was or wasn't happy with what he did!".
Ashwaq, who was granted asylum in Germany after her release, decided to get back to Iraq in 2018 and started a lawsuit against Sahab, leading to his arrest, in an unprecedented move.
"'I want my story to reach the whole world, so my message is heard by my friends and gives them the courage to do the same thing that I did, so that they can get revenge on Daesh,' she said, using the Arabic acronym for the Islamic State"https://t.co/SQFmTRN8FA
— Bill Rice (@RiceBill57) March 3, 2020
Upon receiving the court rule sentencing her rapist to death, Ashwaq hoped that the justice her case resulted in would inspire many other Iraqi women to report ISIS members who used them as sex slaves over the last few years.
