It is the dead of night in north-east Syria and armed soldiers are hunting Islamic State (IS) extremists, five years after declaring that the terror group was crushed.
The mainly Kurdish soldiers who make up the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) run in and out of tents in the sprawling Al-Hol refugee camp which sits near the Syria-Iraq border.
Buried beneath this tented city, they’ve found a cache of weapons and explosives in tunnels, including AK47s, hand grenades and rocket propelled grenades. They’ve also found IS flags and the coins they used.
It’s quiet and dark. The soldiers wear body armour and night-vision goggles. Their boots crunch on stones in the dusty alleyways between the tents. Al-Hol’s residents are sleeping and as the troops burst into tents they find children and women under blankets.
The sudden presence of these soldiers, clad in helmets, holding guns and with ammunition strapped to them, startles the occupants. Some of the children start crying.
The surprise is deliberate. IS cells operating in the camp still have Yazidi captives – women and children they kidnapped a decade ago. In the past, extremists have gone to great lengths to hide their slaves or sabayas.
Wary of deceit, the soldiers are curt. They ask the women to lift their veils because they know many Yazidis are too scared to identify themselves for fear of IS retribution. Others taken as children have spent so many years with the extremists, they no longer remember their old lives.
Alone in a tent with two small children, a young woman identifies herself as Yazidi. Her name is Kovan, she says, with a look of fear on her face. If the soldiers leave her in the camp, she will face a violent beating or worse from IS loyalists. But much to Kovan’s relief, the soldiers make a quick decision to take her and the little boy, aged six, and the little girl, aged four.
They join several other women and their children who the troops also suspect of being Yazidis. Kovan gathers up some clothes for the children and dons a burqa. She doesn’t want to be spotted by anyone in case she ends up back in the camp.
The group is bundled into a military vehicle and taken out of the camp’s barricaded perimeter. They will all be investigated to determine exactly who they are. The journey out is tense. Nobody speaks. These women’s lives depend on being able to prove who they are, but without any formal documents it will be an agonising process.
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The Islamic State rampaged through Iraq and Syria in 2014 capturing swathes of territory and setting up a Caliphate. They attacked Sinjar in northern Iraq, the historic home to the world’s oldest and largest Yazidi community.
The Yazidis are an ancient Kurdish-speaking ethnic and religious group, which integrates elements of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. IS view the Yazidis as ‘godless’ and set about systematically murdering, torturing and raping them.
During this campaign of violence around 400,000 Yazidis fled their homes. The extremists slaughtered thousands of men and older women, burying their bodies in mass graves. They also took more than 6,000 women and children captive to sell as slaves.
My camera team was in north Syria and Iraq through much of the Islamic State’s reign. We reported alongside the 80-strong international coalition formed to crush the terror group and reclaim territory.
I met Yazidi women who had escaped and heard tales of the abuse they’d suffered at the hands of IS fighters. Many had babies born from the rape who were rejected by their communities as “IS babies”. Some told me the terror group had sexually abused their young children, while others were given contraception to ensure they did not conceive.
The retaking of Baghouz in eastern Syria by US-led coalition forces in March 2019, marked the territorial defeat of IS in Syria. Thousands of male extremists were taken to detention centres run by the SDF, where they still await trial. The IS families – and their secret Yazidi slaves – are still housed in two sprawling camps in north-east Syria, which the authorities describe as a “ticking time bomb”.
Meanwhile, nearly 3,000 Yazidi women are estimated to still be missing, believed held captive.
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Kovan, who is 24 years old, told her rescuers that IS took her captive alongside her family when they stormed Sinjar. She was just 14, the eldest of four sisters with an older brother. She was taken to the Al Hol camp after the extremist group collapsed, where, she says, IS families abused her for being Yazidi.
Within days of her capture, Kovan was paraded in front of IS fighters who bought her and then took her home to be raped and beaten. Sold multiple times, she was moved around IS territory from Mosul to Raqqa and then to Baghouz.
The first man who bought her was twice her age. She hadn’t even started menstruating. As she recalls the horrific abuse she suffered, there is a mix of anger and sorrow in her voice. When she tried to run away, he dragged her back by her hair and beat her. “He said he’d kill me and bury me in his backyard if I didn’t do what he wanted.”
“I was raped every day for two years,” she says. Her tone is matter-of-fact but her eyes indicate a deep pain. Her two children were born of rape by two separate IS men, both of whom are now believed to be dead.
During that time, she also witnessed a 10-year-old child being raped.
Now, Kovan wants the men who defiled her, and the IS wives who helped them, to be held accountable for their actions.
“The women were just as bad,” she says. “They knew what their husbands were doing. They dressed us and put makeup on us so we could be raped by their husbands”.
After the soldiers lifted Kovan out of the camp, she was taken to a Yazidi safehouse where they successfully traced her surviving family. Two of Kovan’s sisters and her older brother had already been freed but her parents and youngest sister, who was only eight-years-old when she was taken, were still missing.
Meanwhile, her children remained in the care of the Kurdish authorities, due to fears over their safety. The decision to leave them was heartbreaking for Kovan, who hopes to be reunited with them in future. “I love them, of course,” she said, breaking down in tears for the first time in front of us.
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Shortly after, Kovan was finally reunited with the rest of her extended family. But none of them have returned to Sinjar District. They’re split up in tents scattered around Iraq between Duhook and Erbil. Many of the graveyards in their home region of Sinjar have rows of empty pits with relatives still unaware of their loved one’s fate.
Kovan’s freedom is bittersweet. Upon her return, her surviving family showered her with sweets, sang and hugged her in delight and relief on having her returned to them. But her smile seemed skin-deep. Her trauma will take years to overcome, if she can conquer it at all. And she knows that. She has survived a genocide, a massacre and unthinkable brutality.
Only justice will bring her peace but so far there has been only a handful of persecutions worldwide for what Britain, and many other countries, now recognise as genocide against the Yazidis.
With assistance from camera Jake Britton, specialist producer Chris Cunningham and assistant producers Fahad Fattah and Fazel Hawramy
