Yazidi girl captured by ISIS set herself on fire to avoid sex slavery

Yazidi women attend a demonstration at a refugee camp in Turkey to mark the second anniversary of what a UN-appointed commission of independent war crimes investigators termed a genocide against the Yazidi population by ISIS.Reuters

A teenage girl has described how she burned herself alive to escape rape and torture by the Islamic State terror group.

Yasmin, a Yazidi, has now found refuge in Germany.

She was captured by ISIS aged 16 and spent seven days in captivity. She managed to escape and was in a refugee camp in Iraq when she feared she was at risk of being taken again.

In an attempt to protect herself, she doused herself in petrol and set it alight in a deliberate attempt to disfigure herself and make herself unattractive. 

"Their voice was in my ears... I could hear their voice, I was so scared," she told Associated Press. "I couldn't take it anymore. And this is what happened to me."

Yasmin, now 18, is one of 1,100 mainly Yazidi women who have managed to flee Islamic State and are getting help from psychologists in Germany for the trauma they have suffered.

They all have permission to remain in Germany for two years.

She and her sister had fled into the mountains to escape ISIS. She is now reunited with her parents, sister and two brothers in Germany. 

"In the view of the Islamic State ideology, these people are not human beings," German doctor Jan Ilhan Kizilhan, who is leading the psychological treatment programme, told the Associated Press. "We experienced that also in the Nazi regime in Germany, they did the same with the Jews."

Thousands of women and girls were abducted by ISIS militants when the jihadist group invaded the Sinjar region in northern Iraq in August 2014. Hundreds of civilians were slaughtered and more than 400,000 forced to flee. Around 5,000 were taken captive, 3,000 of whom are believed to remain hostage.

Women and girls who have managed to escape have told stories of brutal abuse. They have been bartered and sold for as little as a packet of cigarettes, and kept in dungeons as sex slaves.

Yazidism is an offshoot of Zoroastrianism, which blends ancient religious traditions with both Christianity and Islam. ISIS believes them to be "devil-worshippers".