Women Reclaim Their Lives After Two Brutal Years Under ISIS Rule: “Now We Are Free”

[misterhighwasted]

http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_57ed6c2ae4b024a52d2dc5b9

Women Reclaim Their Lives After Two Brutal Years Under ISIS Rule: “Now We Are Free”
They rejoice in finally being able to wear bright colors, speak their minds and laugh in public.


Displaced Iraqi girls from the northern Iraqi town of Qayyarah sit in a vehicle belonging to Iraqi security forces as they transfer to Tikrit on Aug. 29.

QAYYARAH, Iraq ― For over two years, heavily armed men from the so-called Islamic State dictated nearly every aspect of life for women in this northern Iraqi town.

Women were forced to hide themselves from the world: Their bodies, cloaked in billowing black fabric. Their hands, encased in gloves. Their eyes, lowered, or hidden entirely under a black face veil. Their voices, muted.

School was out of the question for girls. And no woman was to leave the house without a male guardian.




SOPHIA JONES/THE WORLDPOST

The hardliners are still nearby, just one town over ― but the men, and perhaps most dramatically, women, here are reclaiming their lives just the same.

At least some of these women now seem to speak freely and from the heart about their lives under ISIS. When interacting with a reporter inside the town’s medical center, one group of women loudly shared a flurry of damning testimony, erupting into laughter at the commotion they caused. There was no holding back.

“ISIS brought us back to the olden days,” said Hind, a 22-year-old nurse wearing a bright pink headscarf. “Now, you’ll find a generation without education.”


Children stand near a burning oil well, lit ablaze by ISIS in their retreat, just over a month after Iraqi forces drove out the extremist group. The thick black smoke burns the eyes and throat, causing great discomfort and health issues for people living in Qayyarah.

Her energy filled up a tiny room packed with female nurses, patients and an Iraqi official who kept urging The WorldPost to leave, later citing security reasons. The women ignored him and only talked louder and over one another, eager to tell their stories.

Snip

Some schools here ― previously replaced by so-called Islamic educational courses, which were filled with violent ISIS propaganda ― will soon be reopened, at least the ones that weren’t destroyed in airstrikes. That can’t come soon enough.

Snip
For crimes ISIS deemed most egregious, grisly executions are filmed and edited into widely disseminated propaganda videos.

The hardline fighters turned one Qayyarah home into a prison, its second story transformed into a nightmarish space filled with cramped, filthy, windowless cells. Taped onto one cell door was a list of names ― the unfortunate souls previously locked inside.

Another woman, Amal, shook her head angrily, recalling the group’s twisted, violent version of Islam that emboldened ISIS to enforce a strict lifestyle largely foreign to this town’s mainly Sunni Muslim residents.

“It’s not right,” she said. “This is not in Islam.”

While local women say life was hellish under ISIS, it was the Yazidi women and girls who suffered the unimaginable. Fighters kept members of the religious minority, whom they deem heretical, as sex slaves in Qayyarah, as they do across other parts of Iraq and Syria.

The militant group overran Mount Sinjar in August 2014, massacring thousands and taking thousands more hostage as slaves, child soldiers and human shields.

Hind says she recalls seeing a pregnant Yazidi woman bleeding badly between her legs. She managed to help her get medical attention, at least temporarily saving her life. But Hind never saw her again.

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Incredible sad but good read. How horrific these people were treated.
I thought of The Clinton Foundation. This is a situation that would certainly benefit from its compassion, global influence and good works.

[BlancheSplanchnik]

1. Your last paragraph, about the Clinton Foundation...

That brought out the tears, for some reason. To think that's the foundation's mission...that touched my heart.

[misterhighwasted]

2. Yup. This entire story brought out tears for the horrid life women, men, boys & girls endured .

Horrific life & equally horrific death under such a brutal useless bunch.
That is difficult to grasp.

[BlancheSplanchnik]

3. Yes. It sure is.

That convinces me that you have to focus in the moment....... yet at the same time keep your focus on moving forward the best you can in whatever you have to face.