In a parliamentary question to Vice President Fuat Oktay, pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) deputy Feleknas Uca questioned how the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) terrorist organization can bring Yazidi slaves to the Turkish capital of Ankara.
Uca’s question came following news of a 24-year-old Yazidi woman being rescued by her relatives from a house in the Sincan district of Ankara.
According to a report published in Gazete Duvar, the woman, called Zozan K. for security reasons, was originally abducted from Iraq by ISIS militants during the Sinjar massacre in August 2014. Zozan was 16 years old at the time.
On August 3, 2014 ISIS terrorists overran the city of Sinjar in northern Iraq. The town had a population of 90,000 people, most of them Yazidis, with a small Shia minority.
Yazidis are a non-Muslim religious and ethnic minority who have been viciously targeted and persecuted by ISIS for their beliefs.
When ISIS seized control of Sinjar and the surrounding countryside, they immediately began to destroy Yazidi shrines and slaughter Yazidi civilians. Thousands of people, particularly men and boys, were executed, while thousands more, especially women and girls, were abducted and raped as sex slaves by ISIS fighters.
Surviving family members kept looking for Zozan and found her information in an online slave market on the dark web. They learned that she was sold to an Iraqi Turkoman ISIS militant. Around 10 months ago they discovered she had been brought to Ankara by the militant. Zozan lived in Ankara with two wives and four children of the militant, who kept traveling between Iraq and Ankara.
Her family was able to broker a deal with the militant in Iraq and paid him to release Zozan. She was picked up from the house in Ankara and was taken out of Turkey.
Zozan was subjected to systematic rape. She showed signs of malnutrition and has difficulty talking. Her family also said she has deep wounds caused by cigarette burns and razor cuts. Zozan told her family she was also beaten by the militant’s wives.
According to deputy Uca, another woman was saved from ISIS captivity last year in Ankara’s Keçiören district. Uca also claimed a family in the Central Anatolian city of Kırşehir left two siblings they had abducted at an orphanage but that a Turkish court refused to give the children to their elder sister.
Uca asked Vice President Oktay if it was normal that women who were sold as slaves were brought to and live in the capital city of Turkey. Uca also asked how an ISIS militant can easily travel to and out of Turkey and if the perpetrators of the three cases were under investigation.
