“Hello?” The voice is muffled, crackly, and barely audible, but the caller’s desperation is clear: “Our situation is very bad and cannot get any worse.”
On the other end of the phone, Ameena Saeed Hasan offers a lifeline: the chance to plot an escape from slavery at the hands of ISIS.
Every day, Hasan takes calls like this one. A former Iraqi lawmaker, she is now making it her mission to rescue as many Yazidi women as she can.
When ISIS first captured Mosul, Hasan thought the Yazidi on Mount Sinjar would be safe.
“We said ‘Why would they come to Sinjar?'” she recalls. “There is no oil or anything. What would they take?”
But ISIS fighters did come to Sinjar. There may not have been any oil reserves for them to steal, but instead they took another of the region’s most important resources: its people.
Islamic militants captured thousands of Yazidi women and children, and killed the men. ISIS claims the Quran justifies taking non-Muslim women and girls captive, and permits their rape.
The Yazidis, a small Iraqi minority who believe in a single god who created the Earth and left it in the care of a peacock angel, have been subjected to large-scale persecution by ISIS, which accuses them of devil worship.
The United Nations has accused ISIS of committing genocide against the Yazidis.
The families of many of the missing have reached out to Hasan for help.
“People know me,” she explains. “I am from Sinjar and also I am Yazidi. I know many people who were kidnapped. Some were my relatives, my neighbors, and they called me.”
Together with her husband, Khalil, Hasan manages a network to smuggle the women out: she takes the calls, and Khalil makes the dangerous journey to the Iraq-Syria border to bring them to safety.
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