How a 12-Year-Old Yazidi Sex Slave Outsmarted and Escaped From Her Islamic State Captors

A 12-year-old girl being held captive by the Islamic State managed to escape from the terror group after some creative problem solving.

The girl and her 17-year-old aunt, both members of the persecuted Yazidi minority, were captured by the group west of Mosul and kept as sex slaves for four months until the 12-year-old came up with the idea to sneak sleeping pills into their captor’s tea, RT news reported.

Iraqi Parliament Member Vian Dakhil confirmed the girls’ escape to the Kurdish agency, BasNews.

Dakhil, who is herself a Kurdish Yazidi, said the two girls were being held by the terror group at a house in the Tel Afar district of Iraq.

According to Dakhil, the girls obtained the pills by telling their guards they were having difficulty sleeping.

“Then, they put the medicine in militants’ tea and secured their escape after they fell asleep,” Dakhil told BasNews.

After their captors drifted off, the girls escaped to surrounding Kurdish-controlled areas.

RT news reported that, though the 12-year-old was reunited with her mother and sister, two or three of her siblings are still being held by the terror group.

Past reports make it clear that this young girl’s escape was not the typical tale of an Islamic State sex slave. Those who refuse to perform what the group calls “sexual jihad” are often killed for their disobedience.

"At least 250 girls have so far been executed by IS for refusing to accept the practice of sexual jihad, and sometimes the families of the girls were also executed for rejecting to submit to IS's request," Kurdistan Democratic Party official Said Mamuzini told BasNews.

Ghayas Surchi, a PUK official from Mosul, told BasNews that women living in the territories held by the Islamic State are treated as commodities and often have no say in whom they marry.

The Yazidi people first came under Islamic State control in August 2014, when the group occupied Mount Sinjar, home to thousands of Yazidis.

The United Nations issued a report in January revealing that some 3,500 people were being held as slaves by the Islamic State in Iraq, the majority of those people being Yazidi women and children.

The Islamic State believes that capturing Yazidi women is acceptable because they are non-Muslim infidels. According to a pamphlet the group released back in 2014, members are allowed to have sex with Yazidi women, especially virgins. The manual instructs that in order for members to have sex with a non-virgin Yazidi, the woman’s “uterus must be purified.”

The U.N. has reported that the radicals have kidnapped thousands of women and girls as young as 12 years old for the purpose of selling them into the sex trade or offering them to fighters as rewards.