Roza Barakat’s tormentors have been defeated, however the horrors she endured nonetheless maintain her captive.

She was 11 years outdated when she was captured and enslaved by the Islamic State group, together with hundreds of different Yazidi girls and ladies taken when the militants overran northern Iraq of their brutal 2014 marketing campaign.

Torn from her household within the city of Sinjar, the enclave of the traditional spiritual Yazidi minority, she was taken to Syria, bought a number of instances and repeatedly raped. She bore a toddler, a boy she has since misplaced. Now, at 18, she speaks little of her native Kurdish dialect, Kurmanji.

With the defeat of IS in 2019, Barakat slipped into the shadows, opting to cover within the turmoil that adopted the worst of the battles. As IS fighters had been arrested, their wives and youngsters had been packed into detention camps. Barakat was free, however she could not go house.

“I do not know the way I will face my neighborhood,” she instructed The Related Press, talking in Arabic, as she nervously performed with the ends of her lengthy darkish braid, the crimson polish on her dainty fingers fading.

For years, her IS captors instructed her she would by no means be accepted if she returned. “I believed them,” she mentioned.

Barakat’s story, corroborated by Yazidi and Syrian Kurdish officers, is a window into the sophisticated realities confronted by many Yazidi girls who got here of age underneath the brutal rule of IS. Traumatized and misplaced, many battle to return to phrases with the previous, whereas the Yazidi neighborhood is at odds over how you can settle for them.

“What do you count on from a toddler who was raped at 12, gave start at 13?” mentioned Faruk Tuzu, co-chair of Yazidi Home, an umbrella of Yazidi organizations in northeastern Syria. “After a lot shock and abuse they do not consider in something anymore, they do not belong anyplace.”

The AP doesn’t sometimes determine individuals who say they’re victims of sexual assault except they grant permission.

Barakat spoke to the AP from a protected home run by Tuzu’s group only a few days after the chief of the Islamic State group, believed to have performed a key function within the enslavement of Yazidi girls, was killed in a U.S. raid in northwestern Syria.

She shrugged off the information, saying it does not make a distinction.

IS first bought Barakat to an Iraqi from Tal Afar, a person older than her father. She shudders as she recounts how he “made me name his spouse ‘mom.'” After just a few months she was bought to a different man.

Ultimately, her IS captors gave her a selection: Convert to Islam and marry an IS fighter, or be bought once more. She transformed, she says, to keep away from being bought. She married a Lebanese they selected for her, a person who ferried meals and tools for IS fighters.

“He was higher than most,” she mentioned. At 13, she gave start to a son, Hoodh. On the peak of the militants’ self-proclaimed “caliphate,” they lived within the metropolis of Raqqa, the IS capital.

As soon as, she begged her husband to search out out what occurred to her older sisters who had been taken similar to her. She had misplaced hope that her dad and mom had been nonetheless alive.

Some weeks later, he instructed her he discovered certainly one of her sisters, holding up a photograph of a girl in Raqqa’s slave market the place Yazidi ladies had been bought.

“How completely different she seems,” Barakat remembers pondering.

By early 2019 as IS rule was crumbling, Barakat fled together with her husband first to the jap Syrian metropolis of Deir el-Zour, after which to the city of Baghouz, which turned IS’s final stand. As U.S.-backed Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces surrounded Baghouz, a protected passage was supplied to girls and youngsters.

At this level, Barakat may have stepped ahead and recognized herself as a Yazidi and sought security. However as an alternative, she clutched Hoodh in her arms and walked out of the city with different IS wives.

At the moment, over 2,800 Yazidi girls and youngsters are nonetheless lacking, mentioned Tuzu. Some have minimize ties and are constructing new lives outdoors the neighborhood, believing that in the event that they return, they’d be killed. Others worry being separated from their kids, fathered by IS members.

Iraq’s Yazidi neighborhood has compelled girls returning to Sinjar to surrender their kids as a situation to return. Many had been instructed their kids can be adopted by Syrian Kurdish households however dozens have ended up in an orphanage in northeastern Syria.

The destiny of the youngsters has been on the heart of an ongoing debate inside the Yazidi neighborhood. In 2019, the Yazidi Non secular Council, the very best authority amongst Yazidis, referred to as on members to simply accept all Yazidi survivors of IS atrocities. Days later, the council clarified the choice excluded kids born of IS rape.

“That is our mistake, and we acknowledge that — we did not permit the youngsters to stick with their moms,” mentioned Tuzu.

He confirmed that some Yazidi girls are nonetheless at al-Hol camp, which holds tens of hundreds of girls and youngsters, principally wives, widows and youngsters of IS members.

Most of the lacking Yazidis scattered throughout Syria and Turkey, others reside clandestine lives within the Syrian metropolis of Aleppo and in Deir El-Zour. Tuzu expects the bulk might have gone to the insurgent province of Idlib, the place al-Qaida is dominant however the place IS additionally maintains a presence.

After strolling out of Baghouz with different IS girls in March 2019, Barakat slipped away to a close-by village slightly than find yourself in a camp. With the assistance of IS sympathizers, she took a smuggling route and ended up in Idlib, in northwesten Syria, in a house for IS widows. Her husband was killed in Baghouz.

Right here, Barakat’s story diverges from what she instructed officers. Initially, she instructed them she had left her son behind in Idlib to search out work elsewhere. She instructed the AP that Hoodh died after an airstrike in Idlib.

When pressed to make clear, she mentioned: “It is exhausting. I do not wish to discuss it.”

With the assistance of a smuggler, she made her method to Deir el-Zour and finally discovered work at a clothes market, saving up for a brand new life in Turkey.

She nonetheless dreamed of constructing it to Turkey when Kurdish inner safety forces caught her final month, ready in a home within the city of al-Tweinah to be taken by smugglers throughout the Syria-Turkey border.

She was held and interrogated for days.

“I did every little thing to cover that I used to be Yazidi,” she mentioned. She instructed the investigators she was from Deir el-Zour, and hoped to get medical remedy in Turkey, however they did not purchase it.

One held up an outdated picture discovered on her cell phone — a younger Yazidi girl in an IS slave market — and requested her to elucidate.

“The phrases simply got here out: ‘That’s my sister,'” Barakat mentioned.

As soon as the reality was out, Barakat was taken to a protected home within the village of Barzan, in Syria’s Hassakeh province, the place the Yazidi neighborhood welcomed her.

“I used to be in shock to listen to their form phrases, and to be welcomed the way in which I used to be,” she mentioned.

She is not prepared to return to Sinjar simply but. Her total household was both killed or remains to be unaccounted for.

What’s there to return to, she wonders. “I want time, for myself.”