Taken captive by Isis age 15 now this young Kurdish woman is looking for home

It's been 10 years since Hilwa was abducted, as Rachel Hagan talks to her about how displacement extended the suffering

- Rachel Hagan

As a teenager, Hilwa* dreamed of growing up and getting married. She, her sisters and neighbours would spend hours under the sun on the flat roof of their home, in a small village in Iraqi Kurdistan, sketching the perfect dress.

“I was obsessed with fashion”, she says, anxiously plaiting the tassels on her scarf repeatedly as she speaks. But now, “I can’t even wear the clothes I want to because of this,” Hilwa, a Yazidi, moves the scarf aside and lifts her shirt to show a red rash travelling from her stomach to her chest.

The young woman was 15 when Isis arrived in her hometown of Sinjar, a decade ago in August 2014. Isis killed or abducted thousands of people. Around 5,000 Yazidis were massacred and up to 7,000 women and girls were captured and sold off.

Hilwa first developed the itchy rash she calls a “skin disease” when she was in Isis captivity. Still undiagnosed, the red sores have remained for years – acting as an unwelcome reminder of all she endured.

She gives a hint of a smile as she enters the office of the nongovernmental organisation (NGO) Dak, approximately nine miles south of the city of Duhok. Petrified she could be punished for speaking out, she doesn’t want to share her identity. But sitting on a plastic chair with her hair scraped back, she tells The Independent: “If I don't speak, who will speak for us [Yazidis]? Unless we speak for ourselves no one will hear us.” Her face is haunted. She has witnessed so much that a decade of pain in her eyes is almost too much to bear.

At one stage, Isis held a third of Iraq and neighbouring Syria before being pushed back by US-backed forces and militias and collapsing in 2019.