Former ISIS sex slave demands justice for Yazidis

March 22, 2017, Alexandra King

Read CNN News article here.

(CNN)A Yazidi woman who was kidnapped and taken as a sex slave by ISIS told CNN's Fareed Zakaria on Sunday that the Iraqi government and the UN should establish an investigation in order to bring members of the brutal regime to justice. 

Nadia Murad, along with her counsel, international human rights lawyer Amal Clooney, described her ordeal to Zakaria. It began in 2014 after ISIS militants arrived at her village in Sinjar, Kurdistan, she said. 

"Early morning on August 3, 2014, they attacked us," she recalled.

“Nearly 6,500 women and children from the Yazidi were abducted and about 5,000 people from the community were killed during that day. For eight months, they separated us from our mothers and our sisters and our brothers, and some of them were killed and others disappeared.”

Murad's mother and six of her brothers and stepbrothers were executed. Murad, along with other unmarried women, was taken as a sex slave and passed around various ISIS militants. 

At one point, she told the UN Security Council in 2015, as punishment for a failed escape attempt, she was gang raped until she passed out. All of this, she said, was considered legal under ISIS rule -- which dictates that Yazidis, because they do not practice Islam, can be taken as slaves on religious grounds.

"They sold girls, girls that were underage, because ISIS considered that permissible under Islamic law," Murad said. "They came not just to attack certain people, but they came for all Yazidis."