19 Heroic Women Die at the Hands of ISIS

On Thursday, 19 Yezidi women chose death over being degraded and sexually abused by members of ISIS.

“The longer they are held by ISIS, the more horrific life becomes for Yezidi women, bought and sold, brutally raped, their children torn from them,” said a Human Rights Watch researcher.

Despite being sold into sex slavery — a practice the Islamic State has sanctioned on a disturbingly large scale — these young women refused to have sex with their captors. They were thus burned alive in front of hundreds on onlookers, ARA News reported.

ISIS’s barbarous treatment of Yezidi women has been publicized in countless stories reported from the Middle East, but this event that took place in Mosul is surely among the worst.

“The 19 girls were burned to death, while hundreds of people were watching. Nobody could do anything to save them from the brutal punishment,” a witness reported to ARA News in Mosul.

The violence against these women and young girls by ISIS jihadists has consistently occurred since August of 2014. Human Rights Watch has called for an end to this horrific violence.

“The longer they are held by ISIS, the more horrific life becomes for Yezidi women, bought and sold, brutally raped, their children torn from them,” said Skye Wheeler, who is a women’s rights emergencies researcher at Human Rights Watch, to ARA News.

Related: Genocide by ISIS: Words vs. Actions

“Many of the abuses, including torture, sexual slavery, and arbitrary detention, would be war crimes if committed in the context of the armed conflict, or crimes against humanity if they were part of ISIS policy during a systematic or widespread attack on the civilian population,” the Human Rights Watch report explained. “The abuses against Yezidi women and girls documented by Human Rights Watch, including the practice of abducting women and girls and forcibly converting them to Islam and/or forcibly marrying them to ISIS members, may be part of a genocide against Yezidis.”

More than 3,000 women and girls have been taken by ISIS and forced into sex slavery.

The number of disturbing stories of the plight of these Yezidis women seem to be increasing by the day — and the few women who have been able to escape have given new insight into the true depravity of the situation.