Former ISIS Sex Slaves Fight Back

After witnessing the slaughter of their families, being forced into sex slavery, and fighting their way to freedom, these women are coming together for vengeance.The Yazidi women call themselves the "Force of the Sun Ladies," a name that references their culture's reverence for the sun. They are a piece of some 2,000 captives who have escaped the horrors of ISIS torture.The Yazidi people were among those that ISIS has targeted in their genocidal campaign to remove non-Muslim peoples from the Middle East. Some 200,000 Yazidi people have been displaced and thousands more have been killed. ISIS members have been known to kill those too young or old to be sold as sex slaves, and remove young boys from their mothers to indoctrinate them as new soldiers. One woman described her painful labor while living as a sex slave, and the immediate removal of her child when it was born. She was not permitted to feed the baby, and when it cried from hunger, it was beheaded.

“Whenever a war wages, our women end up as the victims,” said Capt. Khatoon Khider, one of the female fighers. “Now we are defending ourselves from the evil; we are defending all the minorities in the region... We will do whatever is asked of us.”The women have trained with the Kurdish Peshmerga forces, who are among the local and international units planning attacks on Mosul, a current ISIS stronghold. Many Yazidi people are still held captive there, most of them female sex slaves.Most of the members of the Sun Ladies had little to no combat experience when they volunteered to fight, and some members are as young as 17 years old. But age does not dampen the courage of these women, as they seek to liberate their friends and family members from the same fate that they mercifully escaped.“We have a lot of our women in Mosul being held as slaves,” Khider said. “Their families are waiting for them. We are waiting for them. The liberation might help bring them home.”Khider hopes that the Sun Ladies will inspire other minority groups that have been plagued by ISIS to stand and fight with them.“Our elite force is a model for other women in the region,” she said. “We want to thank all the other countries who help us in this difficult time, we want everyone to take up weapons and know how to protect themselves from the evil.”