Contact Admin. The posting in Arabic is chilling. A girl for sale: The advertisement, along with others for kittens, tactical gear and weapons, appeared on an encrypted Telegram app and was shared with the Associated Press by an activist with Iraq's persecuted Yazidi community, which is trying to free an estimated 3, women and girls still held as sex slaves by IS extremists.
As the Islamic State group loses control of one city after another in its self-styled caliphate, it is tightening its grip on its captives, taking the Yazidis deeper into its territory and selling them as chattel on popular encrypted apps such as Telegram and WhatsApp. The extremists are targeting smugglers who rescue captives for assassination and are deploying a slave database with captives' photos and owners' names to prevent escape through checkpoints.
Thousands of Kurdish-speaking Yazidis were taken prisoner and thousands more were massacred when IS fighters overran their northern Iraqi villages in August Since then, as the Yazidi captives have been conscripted into sexual slavery, smugglers have managed to free 2, women and girls.
But by May, an IS crackdown reduced those numbers to just 39 in the last six weeks, according to figures provided by the Kurdistan regional government. The AP has obtained a batch of 48 headshots of the captives, smuggled out by an escapee. The portraits appear to be the same as those used in a database to prevent the captives from slipping past checkpoints, or for barter and sale on popular apps.
Mirza Danai, founder of the German-Iraqi aid organisation Luftbrucke Irak, said the slave database documents the captives as if they were property. One of those girls is Lamiya Aji Bashar, who in March made her fifth attempt at escape, running to the border with IS fighters in pursuit. A land mine exploded, and two Yazidi girls who were accompanying her were killed. The bomb left Lamiya blind in her right eye, her face scarred by melted skin.
