'American ISIS leader owned me,' says escaped 19-year-old Yazidi sex slave

Jinan Badel, the Yazidi author of the book "Jinan, Daesh's Slave," poses during the opening of a one-day UN conference to find ways to help minorities in the Middle East persecuted by ISIS militants, in Paris, France, on Sept. 8, 2015.Reuters

A 19-year-old Yazidi woman, who reportedly escaped from the clutches of the Islamic State as one of its sex slaves, has claimed that she was "owned" by a young American who, she said, appears to be a top leader of the jihadist group.

Known as Nada, the lady told the Daily Mail in a recent interview that the American she identified as Abu Abdullah al-Amriki, an Islam convert, often boasts of regularly and easily travelling to the United States to visit his family.

She claimed that the 23-year-old American showed her pictures of his family and his two children, but said they [his family] were not around or too far away.

Authorities have yet to find out the identity of the American, who according to Nada and other Yazidi women, speaks poor Arabic but is responsible for several military operations, a CNN report said.

Nada also shared that when guests come out of his hideout, the American "was always explaining things to them and he was even drawing maps of the fighting.''

"He was telling everyone how to fight, about how to make an ambush," she said.

Al-Amriki also reportedly always carries an AK47 rifle, a pistol, a vial of poison to kill himself if he got caught, and a policeman's stick that he used "to beat me and the boy'' [another prisoner] in his custody, according to Nada.

She said sniper rifles are also seen "lying around'' in the house.

Nada was captured in August 2014 in northern Iraq and sold as a sex slave in October. She is reportedly now in the United States and is giving testimony to the FBI to help the agency capture the terrorist.

Authorities are comparing the testimony of Nada to that of "Bazi," another Yazidi woman, who told CNN in an earlier interview that she was also a slave of an American ISIS militant, the Mail said.

Nada told investigators that when she was purchased at a slave market, she was with eight other women and a boy. When seven of the women were subsequently re-sold, she said she was left with another woman she called "Bazi."

The Yazidi women both managed to escape Abdullah's clutches when he departed to join the fighting, possibly around the contested town of Kobani, said CNN.

"Nada managed to steal his cell phone and the trio of slave fugitives made their way north until they were intercepted by Kurdish police,'' the report said.

Some 400,000 Yazidis were forced to leave their homes in 2014 when the ISIS launched an offensive in northern Iraq. Majority of them sought refuge in the Kurdish enclave, which has taken in a total of 1.5 million displaced Iraqis, including members of Assyrian and Chaldean Christian minorities as well as Muslims, data from the Kurdistan regional government said.

In addition, the report said roughly 300,000 Syrian refugees have fled to northern Iraq.