No mercy for Shamima. British ISIS wives must face international criminal trials, says sex slave ‘bride’

The face of ISIS evil. And why another ISIS ‘wife’ says Shamima Begum must pay for her crimes.

Exclusive – By Paul Martin.

Copyright MediaZones.

Like Shamima Begum, the girl on the right of this photo was also 15 when she was ‘married’ to an ISIS fighter. But there’s a huge difference.

 In 2014 Lamiya Aji Bashar was dragged screaming from her small village in northern Iraq by crazed ISIS fighters and forced to become a ‘married’ sex slave. In contrast, Shamima Begum chose – six months later – to leave her British Muslim family and join a bunch of mass-murdering fanatics.

We can see the face of jihadi evil – a face smashed by the war ISIS launched on civilization.

What does Lamiya think about Begum’s demand to be allowed safely back to Britain?

“No way should she and her ISIS ‘brides’ be allowed to go back yet to their home countries,” she told me in an exclusive interview as she recovers in the safety of Western Europe from her ordeals.

“They should be brought to one international tribunal just like they do at The Hague at the International Criminal Court. 

“They should be punished according to law.  Just like the male fighters and leaders they were all part of the same evil destruction.

“I despise those girls. When I was the same age as they were, 15, the same kind of men that they married captured me, killed my parents and destroyed my community.

“Those British girls had everything in their country: peace, education and the best life, yet they joined the terrorists in Syria who were already busy killing us.

“They put themselves alongside the monsters. The type of men that they married were animals in the bodies of human beings: each worse than the last.

“The British and foreign girls and women knew exactly what the killers and rapists and abusers from Isis were doing. They must have seen the videos..

“I see that they left London in February 2015, and reports and videos of the murdering of hundreds in our villages and the enslavement of girls and women were all over international television and the internet.

“Our village, for example, was invaded six months before these girls chose to come and marry ISIS fighters.

“These foreign girls and women were getting privileges in Mosul and Aleppo and Raqqa, things that the ordinary people never got.

“And of course they knew and saw other fighters, the comrades of their husbands, abusing us, the lowest of the low – the ISIS slave ‘wives’.

“None of these privileged foreign girls and women came to our aid. They treated us just like dirt.

“Don’t tell me they had no idea of the mass slave trade in girls, or the rapes. They must have seen the same horrible things that I saw. Like an Iraqi doctor working with ISIS rape a nine-year-old girl.

“I myself was raped by a large number of ISIS fighters in one room as my sister was forced to watch, again and again. Then I had to see them do the same to my sister.

“Don’t be fooled into seeing these girls as innocents.  They are much more likely to be criminals.”

Lamiya’s story is horrific. She’s part of the small Yazidi community that ISIS falsely considers to be devil-worshippers.

ISIS gunmen overran her peaceful village, Kocho, in northern Iraq, on August 15 2014.  She and all the women were herded into the village school building at gunpoint.

While held inside, she heard the bullets as ISIS fighters executed over 400 male villagers, including her father and brothers. They dumped their bodies in shallow pits.

 Then, inside the school, they selected which females would live, and which were too old to be attractive sex slaves, so they would die – shot dead the next day..

I made a dangerous journey to Kocho last year, after ISIS left the now virtually empty devastated village but still had fighters in nearby locations.  I saw the remains of skulls and bones in the pits. I also saw the school building, and spoke, as it was four years since the massacres and the capture of the women, there was a special memorial gathering taking place.  I spoke to young boys and girls who had survived but had lost most of their families.

Lamiya spent twenty hellish months with six different ISIS men inside the so-called Islamic Caliphate, sold by one to the other and brutally raped time after time.

She was also beaten especially after trying to escape.  Once a sharia court run by the ISIS thugs ordered her leg to be chopped off.  Defiantly she says she told the court if they did that, she would try again to escape using whatever limbs remained.  Instead of chopping off the leg, she was presented to another ISIS ‘official’ for more rape and degradation, she says. 

Lamiya eventually managed to flee. But as she and two other girls ran at night towards potential freedom, her best friend Katrina trod on a landmine.  The explosion killed the friend and a nine-year-old girl running alongside her.

A Kurdish rescuer got Lamiya to hospital in time to save her life, although with horrible scars across her face from the landmine’s shrapnel. She also lost sight in one eye.

 Lamiya’s made a painful but remarkable recovery.

Brave Lamiya has had numerous operations to try to reconstruct and repair her face.

When we met in Europe recently, she mustered the enormous courage to give gut-wrenching details about what happened.

Her first ‘husband’ ordered her to convert to Islam or be killed. “I said no. He grabbed me by the neck and lifted me off  the ground. My sister begged him to release me and kissed his feet. He put me down, then he shouted, ‘So you don’t want to convert!’ and he raped us both.”

She claims the West is not actively searching for over 3,000 girls and women still being held by ISIS criminals. These men, she says,  melted into the villages of Syria and Iraq as their territory shrunk then collapsed – probably taking their ‘brides’ or sex slaves with them..

She hopes by speaking out she can alert the world to the plight of well over one thousand missing Yazidi sex slaves – and to the genocidal hatred her small minority group has faced.

Since ISIS began collapsing, the slave owners have in some cases contacted the anguished families of the missing – offering to sell the girls or women back. These men decided they needed cash more than sex – so they can try to bribe their way into neighbouring countries like Turkey to escape.

As the last ISIS footholds collapsed in February 2019 several Yazidi ‘brides’ or sex slaves have been bought back, traumatised but at least alive.

Their allies the Kurds, who run a semi-autonomous Iraqi statelet, have even set up a special office that pays rescuers.

For her courage and her outspokenness, Lamiya was awarded the European Union’s top award for human rights, the Sakharov Prize, two years ago.  And another escaped sex slave ‘bride’ Nadia Murad was last November awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Mirza Dinnayi, a human rights activist and head of Air Bridge Iraq, a non-governmental organisation that helps bring women and children ISIS victims to safety and often to Europe, confirms Lamiya’s claims.

He told MediaZones: “There are more than 3,100 Yezidi women and children missing and most are presumably still held captive by ISIS in remote places where locals are still protecting ISIS fighters and their families.

“Many of the small children are brainwashed within ISIS families.

“The foreign fighters played a very bad role against the Yazidi slaves. Many survivors have been speaking about those foreign fighters, men and women as well, who have beaten and abused the Yazidi girls.

“These foreign women were not better or different than the Iraqi or Arab ISIS fighters. They had the same tyranny and the same brutality that led to the killing, rape and all kinds of abuse. Sometimes the foreigners were even more cruel than the local ISIS.”