THANK GOD I AM NOT A WOMAN FROM THE LANDS OF BOKO HARAM OR ISIS, I AM NOT SOLD IN OPEN MARKETS,  PASSED FROM ONE MAN TO THE OTHER, REPEATEDLY RAPED AT 12, SUBJECTED TO BEAR CHILDREN AT 14 TO CONTINUE THE SAVAGE IDEOLOGY OF CREATING A MUSLIM STATE!

“They have already killed my body. They are now killing my soul.” That’s how the 17-year-old Yazidi girl held captive by the ISIS terrorists spoke to an Italian journalist from one of the prisons in Iraq. Pretty that she was, she could have been signed off for a role in Hollywood. Instead, she was a sex slave to men who in the name of religion are plundering women in the 21^st century under the very glare of the Western media.

She is Mayat, the voice of hundreds of girls from the ISIS and Boko Haram states of Iraq, Syria or Nigeria. Subjected to brutal sexual attacks from different men daily, she still speaks. Probably that’s the resilience of a woman.

Sexual violence on women has always been a favourite tool of torture by the victors since time immemorial. Be it the plundering Huns or the Mughals in India or even the educated erudite British force on women freedom fighters, we have always been subjected to savagery in times of war. But its unthinkable and beyond our imagination that in the 21^st century women in certain nations ravaged by civil wars can still be subjected to inhuman torture, sold at markets in the open, kidnapped, raped, forced to bear kids at a tender age of 11-12, subjected to sexual slavery and passed on from one man to the other.

Last week, Nigeria marked the first anniversary since more than 200 girls were abducted from a secondary school in Chibok by Boko Haram militants. Nigeria's new president, Muhammadu Buhari, now says he doesn’t know if they would ever be found. Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau claimed responsibility for the kidnap of the girls. A report has found that the terror group has kidnapped at least 2,000 women and girls since 2014 and they have pledged to impregnate these girls fresh into their teens so that as many as children they bear, they can herd them into believing the ideology of an Islamic State. That’s how the world will be taken over by their ideology!

 

Hats off to their ideologies. Wonder if they were born from the womb of a woman! Only last week a BBC documentary aired real life tales of young girls herded into a small hut. Most of them were pregnant, many falling victim to the HIV virus as their rapists infected them. They looked like those pregnant cows tethered to posts in village meadows. At least the cows are fed and taken care of by their owners, these girls don’t even get two square meals. They look tired, defeated, lost. Yes, lost in the game of life even before it had started to flower.

The plight of these young African girls are similar to the Yazidi girls held by their ISIS captors in a secret prison in Mosul, Iraq. As Mayat went on to describe the three “rooms of horror” in the house, where she and her fellow victims are taken several times a day and raped, I asked myself : ‘Do we still live in pre-historic times?’ I would have better born an animal than a woman in such parts of the world.

Mayat was first forced to call her parents, who had somehow made it to safety in Kurdistan. She said her captors made her place the call “to hurt us even more. They told us to describe in detail to our parents what they are doing. Part of me would like to die immediately, to sink beneath the ground and stay there. But another part that still hopes to be saved, and to be able to hug my parents once more.”

“They treat us like slaves. We are always ‘given’ to different men…they threaten us and beat us if we try to resist. Often I wish they would beat me so hard I will die. But they are cowards even in this. None of them have the courage to end our suffering.”

A few women and girls have managed to escape, reporting that those who agree to convert to Islam are being sold to Islamic State fighters for as little as $25. Those that do not face never-ending rape, are subjected to beatings and death. Some of the young girls are so traumatized that they have stopped speaking, while others have tried to commit suicide.

Yet, the fight for territory continues, remains of old civilisations razed to the grounds, destroyed by the terrorists, but who hears the cries of those young captive girls behind prisons and closed doors who are dying day in and day out? Will the Western World do anything for them, or will it only react if their own women are assaulted ever?