Yazidi girl escaped from the Islamic State: “God saved me”

When Adeba Shaker arrived at a house in Raabia, Iraq, after being kidnapped by Islamic State militants last month, one of her captors received a phone call.

A few moments later all five men in the apartment picked up their guns and stormed out.

Shaker, a 14-year-old girl from the Yazidi ethnic minority, heard trucks leaving the property and then silence. For the first time in 20 days she and another girl being held with her were alone with no guards, and the door was unlocked.

Islamic State militants had trafficked Shaker from her village in the northeast Iraq region of Sinjar to the Syrian border and presented her as a “gift” to fighters on the front line. She was to be converted to Islam and forcibly married to one of them.

“When [the militants] left us I panicked, I didn’t know what to do. I saw a bag full of cell phones and I called my brother,” Shaker told Thomson Reuters Foundation by phone from a camp for internally displaced people in Iraq.

The complete story has been published by Reuters and can be found here.