Qasr Al-Mihrab: Years after she was kidnapped by Islamic State militants and sold into slavery, Yazidi woman Leila Taalo revisits the now-abandoned site where she was held against her will, in the far northwest of Iraq.
She was kidnapped in 2014 and eventually sold into sex slavery.
Taalo initially escaped that fate because she and her husband were forcibly converted to Islam.
This allowed her family to live as second-class citizens for a while, working for the Islamic State mainly as herders, along with other Yazidis who were moved there.
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But so many people escaped that the militants eventually gathered all the men and took them away, likely killing them and throwing their bodies into a nearby sinkhole where bones can still be seen whitening in the sun.
It was after this that Taalo was sold as a sex slave.
Investigators piecing together the story of Islamic State kidnappings, enslavement and systematic rape of hundreds of Yazidi women and girls can now show that it was planned at the highest level of the group's leadership, executed through its entire institutional structure and provided with a theological justification.
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This makes it unusual among cases of sexual abuse perpetrated in modern wars, says Bill Wiley of the Commission for International Justice and Accountability, one of the leading investigators on the case.
It also led to a slavery market that proliferated out of the group's control with slave owners and traders buying and slaving Yazidi women for profit.
Taalo was first sold to an Iraqi doctor who three days later gifted her to a friend.
Then she became the property of Abdullah, an Iraqi surgeon, who had her for eight months.
Then for nearly USD 6,000 she was sold to a Saudi man, a member of Islamic State's religious police, who had his private slave market at home, buying and selling women online.
After being raped repeatedly by this man, she was sold to another Saudi, Abu Hamza, also a trader.
He allegedly got her pregnant twice and forced her to abort both pregnancies, even though the Islamic State had rules against abortion, even for slaves.
Throughout this ordeal, her two small children were with her.
Her next owner agreed to free her for an under-the-table payment of USD 7,500, but it meant getting married to another Islamic State fighter.
Eventually, Taalo and her children managed to escape Islamic State territory with the help of smugglers at the cost of USD 19,500, which her family managed to get together.
Of the 6,417 Yazidis abducted during the attack on Sinjar in August 2014, some 3,500 have managed to escape in recent years, most of them ransomed, according to Kurdish officials and researchers.
One of them is Taalo's niece, who returned as recently as February.
More than 2,900 Yazidis are still missing, including 1,344 women and girls.
Researchers believe most are dead although some are still known to be living in opposition-controlled areas of Syria.
(AP)
