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Established in 2006 as a Community of Reality

Welcome to the Neno's Place!

Neno's Place Established in 2006 as a Community of Reality


Neno

I can be reached by phone or text 8am-7pm cst 972-768-9772 or, once joining the board I can be reached by a (PM) Private Message.

Established in 2006 as a Community of Reality

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Established in 2006 as a Community of Reality

Many Topics Including The Oldest Dinar Community. Copyright © 2006-2020


    ‘I cannot sleep at night’: A Yazidi mother’s anguish over her husband and daughters, captured by ISI

    jedi17
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    ‘I cannot sleep at night’: A Yazidi mother’s anguish over her husband and daughters, captured by ISI Empty ‘I cannot sleep at night’: A Yazidi mother’s anguish over her husband and daughters, captured by ISI

    Post by jedi17 Mon 26 Dec 2016, 6:57 pm

    ‘I cannot sleep at night’: A Yazidi mother’s anguish over her husband and daughters, captured by ISIL


    With her youngest son, Hachem, a toddler, fussing at her feet, and her older son, Jamal, who is not yet a teenager, sitting ramrod straight beside her, she explained in a whisper that she, her husband and five children were captured by Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant on Aug. 3, 2014 as the jihadists raced across western Iraq, murdering thousands of Yazidi men and forcing thousands of Yazidi women into sexual slavery.
    Murat and her two boys were freed after 14 months in captivity when her father-in-law and other relatives paid ISIL a US$20,000 ransom.

    Ayshan Murat stands with her two sons, Jamal and Hachem (in her arms) who were released last year in Syria
    But nothing has been heard of her husband or her three daughters since the day the family and their flock of 400 sheep were seized from their farming village at the western foot of Sinjar mountain.
    Murat, Hachem and Jamal were separated from the rest of their kin and taken across the border into Syria with about 500 other Yazidi women and children to ISIL’s self-proclaimed capital of Raqqa. Murat’s husband and girls, aged nine, seven and five, were sent east to Iraq’s second-largest city, Mosul, which is now besieged on all sides by Iraqi and Kurdish forces and a mixture of religious militias.
    “I have heard nothing of my husband and daughters since the day that Daesh took us,” Murat said, referring to Islamic State by its Arabic acronym.
    Aid workers familiar with such cases are certain that Murat’s husband is dead and that her daughters have endured the same extreme abuse that Murat must have been subjected to when she was held by ISIL.
    “I cannot sleep at night, I think and I think and I think,” Murat said, before asking why the United Nations and the world had forsaken her family and Yazidis.
    The Yazidis of northwestern Iraq have their own ghastly tale that is without parallel. As barbarically as ISIL has behaved toward Shias and Christians trapped in its path, it reserved a special hell for the Yazidis whom it condemned “as devil worshipers.”
    The Yazidis, who do not follow a written book, believe in one God who created the world and placed it in the care of seven angels.


    The Iraqi and Kurdish governments and international organizations think that within an hour’s drive of Sinjar Mountain there are at least 72 mass graves filled with the bodies of Yazidis who have been shot, or in some cases, buried alive. The leg bones and jaws of some of the victims were clearly visible in a field in the city of Sinjar, which lies just over the mountain from where Murat had sought refuge in an abandoned house with her brother-in-law, his wife and their children, in the town of Sinuni.
    Driving down switchback turns into Sinjar, which was liberated from ISIL by Kurdish forces last month with the help of air strikes directed by American and Canadian special forces spotters, it was still possible to see a ghostly trail of clothing, including shoes that were left behind as Yazidis fled into the hills two years ago. That exodus triggered a humanitarian crisis atop Sinjar Mountain.

    A file picture taken on August 13, 2014, shows displaced Iraqi families from the Yazidi community crossing the Iraqi-Syrian border at the Fishkhabur crossing, in northern Iraq
    Once the economic and cultural heart of the Yazidi community and a home for nearly 100,000 of them, Sinjar is today an abandoned town of shattered, booby-trapped buildings and a warren of tunnels that ISIL used to avoid air strikes and escape.
    ISIL did “terrible things,” said Aziz Chanem as he led a small group of visitors through the ruins of what had been his hometown. “You can understand the meaning of ‘destroyed’ if you come here. Yazidi women were taken. Yazidi men were killed.”
    ISIL provided religious justification for its gross mistreatment of those it regards as non-believers, even outlining its disturbing rules “on taking captives and slaves” in a booklet. It was allowed to beat those women and girls who had been captured but not on the head, the instructions said. There was also a price list. Women between 35 and 40 years of age were to be sold for $75. Women and girls between 10 and 20 years of age were valued at $130. There was a premium on girls under the age of nine. They were listed as costing $172.
    “I don’t think anybody could really understand the depth of human suffering that has happened here,” said Marigold Vercoe, an Australian psychiatric nurse who was been working with Yazidi women for more than a year. “The kind of trauma and kind of cruelty that these people have endured is something beyond what many of us have ever heard of or thought of. How they keep going through the injury and assault and abuse that they have suffered is amazing to me.”

    A sign in Arabic warns returnees not to disturb bones in one of more than 70 mass graves discovered since Islamic State forces were expelled from the city
    “They cannot finalize within themselves whether they are dead or alive or in captivity,” she said. “They live in perpetual grief that can be very taxing.”
    Aziz Khalaf, a veterinarian who oversees intelligence in Sinjar and Sinuni for the Kurdish government, said that since ISIL had been pushed back, about 50,000 of the 180,000 people who lived in the area had been able to return and 23 schools had been reopened. But many more lived in refugee camps. Hundreds of boreholes had to be repaired or drilled to provide water; there was still no electricity. Entire flocks of sheep and chickens stolen by ISIL had to replaced. There was almost no work to be had.
    Despite this heavy mix of problems, those who work in this area continue are propelled by optimism. Marigold Vercoe said she had seen examples of resilience that make her guardedly optimistic that the spirit of the Yazidi women she works with had not been crushed.
    “I am inspired by many of the women that have returned from intense suffering and intense abuse,” she said. “They decide for the sake of their children they are going to get better and they work at making themselves better. They work at providing as comfortable a home as they can in their tent or unfinished building. Many of these women are inspiring to know because of the courage they show. They try to leave behind what has happened behind them.
    “We can help them with material things. But what they want is faith and hope.”
    Ayshan Murat, the shattered wife and mother, told Vercoe that there was nothing she could do to win the release of her husband and daughters.

    “They are in God’s hands,” she said, as she obsessively touched images of her daughters that she had on her cell phone. “We depend on God to take care of us. We believe in Him. I have no power, so I ask God to release them.”
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