Through the deserted streets dotted with charred cars, an old sedan accelerates towards the mountains of Sinjar, whose imposing silhouette tears the horizon, on the northwest border of Iraq. In the back of the vehicle, a five-year-old Yazidi girl has just been rescued from the clutches of the Islamic State (IS), after an exfiltration operation that lasted almost a week. The beginning of July 2016 marks the end of a two-year ordeal for little Imane (name has been changed).
A survivor of the massacres perpetrated on August 3, 2014 by ISIS against the Yazidis in 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 girl was given a price of 6,000 dollars (5,460 euros at that time), then in the Syrian stronghold of IS in Rakka, where she offered at $4,000 on June 22, 2016. The offer to sell, which the world consulted, specifies that Imane “wetting the bed”. The advertisement was published in a virtual market where jihadists buy or sell at auction child hostages of ISIS: boys, destined to become child soldiers from the age of 7, and girls reduced to sexual slaves. This expanding 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 kept track of this human trafficking, both online and in the field: Bahzad Farhan. This thirty-year-old Yazidi is a native of the Iraqi province of Dohuk, where the Lalesh temple is located, a high place of spirituality for his religious community, persecuted over the centuries because it is described as a worshiper of Satan by Christian fundamentalists and Muslims and dedicated to “purification” by jihadists. According to field research, based on systematic censuses, published in 2017 by PLOS, an online scientific publisher, approximately 3,100 Yazidis were killed during the August 2014 offensive. Of this total, 1,400 were executed and 1,700 died of starvation in the gruesome site conditions. Sinjar Mountains. At the time of these estimates, of the 6,800 Yazidis taken hostage, 2,500 were still missing.
Born into a wealthy family of spirits merchants, spread across Iraq and Germany, Bahzad Farhan is a silent force. But his immovable smile hides an unwavering determination. Faced with the genocide of his people, the man put aside his businesses to dedicate himself to the Yazidi hostages of ISIS, saving them, defining the identity of the executioners and documenting 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 be left with tangible proof of the indescribable. » Bahzad lists the dead and missing, collects testimonies from survivors, gathers clues, manages to establish contact with hostages and, on occasion, 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 they published, in 2018, an edifying report on sexual crimes committed against Yazidis by foreign – particularly French – recruits of IS.
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