Through the deserted streets dotted with charred car wrecks, an old sedan speeds towards the Sinjar Mountains, whose imposing silhouette tears up the horizon, on the northwestern borders of Iraq. In the back of the vehicle, a 5-year-old Yazidi girl has just been rescued from the clutches of the Islamic State (IS) organization, at the end of an exfiltration operation which lasted almost a week. The beginning of July 2016 marks the end of a two-year ordeal for little Imane (the name has been changed).
Survivor of the massacres perpetrated on August 3, 2014 by ISIS against the Yazidis on their ancestral lands, she was captured and reduced to slavery by the men in black. First in Mosul, the Iraqi capital of the “caliphate” proclaimed by Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, where the little girl was set a price of 6,000 dollars (5,460 euros at the time), then in the Syrian stronghold of EI in Rakka, where it is offered at $4,000 on June 22, 2016. The sale offer, which The World consulted, specifies that Imane “wet the bed”. The ad was published on a virtual market where ISIS child hostages are bought or sold at auction by the jihadists: boys, destined to become child soldiers from the age of 7, and girls reduced to rank. sex slaves. This sprawling traffic, hosted on the online messaging platform Telegram, will proliferate with impunity throughout the “caliphate”, until its fall in 2019.
Throughout this period, one man tracked this human trafficking, both on the Internet and in the field: Bahzad Farhan. This thirty-year-old Yazidi is from the Iraqi province of Dohuk, where the Lalesh temple is nestled, a high place of spirituality for his religious community, persecuted throughout the ages because it is described as a Satan worshiper by Christian and Muslim fundamentalists and dedicated to “purification” by jihadists. According to a field survey, based on systematic censuses, published in 2017 by PLOS, an online scientific publisherapproximately 3,100 Yazidis died during the August 2014 offensive. Of this total, 1,400 were executed and 1,700 died of starvation in the appalling conditions in the Sinjar Mountains. At the time of these estimates, out of 6,800 Yazidis taken hostage, 2,500 were still missing.
Born into a wealthy family of spirits merchants, scattered between Iraq and Germany, Bahzad Farhan is a quiet force. But his irremovable smile hides an unfailing determination. Faced with the genocide of his people, the man put aside his business to devote himself to the Yazidi hostages of ISIS, to save them, define the identity of the executioners and document their crimes. “There is no written record of the massacres we have suffered throughout historyexplains Bahzad. Yazidi memory was transmitted orally [depuis six mille ans]. I wanted this time to keep tangible proof of the unspeakable. » Bahzad lists the dead and the missing, collects testimonies from survivors, collects clues, manages to make contact with hostages and, sometimes, to exfiltrate them from the “caliphate”. In 2017, he founded the Kinyat association and joined forces with the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) in Paris. Together, in 2018, they published a report edifying on the sexual crimes committed against the Yazidis by foreign recruits – particularly French – of the IS.
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