"It's unbearable."
With these two words, human rights activist and Nobel Peace Prize nominee Nadia Murad Basee Taha summed up the harrowing condition faced by thousands of Yazidi women trapped in Mosul, Iraq as sex slaves of Islamic State (ISIS) militants, ARA News reported.
Amid the house-to-house and street-to-street fighting going in Mosul and "while the world is plunged in politics, 3,400 Yazidi women and girls remain enslaved for ISIS sex use," Taha was quoted as saying by the Syrian independent news agency.
She said only very few Yazidi women have been rescued from the grip of ISIS since the operation to free Mosul began in October.
"I have recently been receiving calls from Yazidi families who need help to rescue their women and girls in ISIS captivity. It's unbearable," Taha said.
She cited the case of one Yazidi mother who told her that her 16-year-old daughter's rescue from ISIS sex slavery costs $15,000, an amount she could not pay. "Yazidi women, even when there is a possibility for them to be rescued, there is no financial support for the work. Unbelievable pain," she told ARA News.
"I have asked human rights colleagues in Erbil what the military plan is for assisting the Yazidi population inside Mosul, in the context of the ongoing operation," Taha said. "They said this is a conversation that hasn't occurred yet."
According to local and military sources, tens of thousands of Yazidis remained trapped on Mount Sinjar, suffering mass killings, kidnappings and rape.
Last week, Kurdish forces backed by the U.S.-led coalition forces, pushed ISIS out of Shingal city near Mount Sinjar. The Kurdish Peshmerga later discovered more than five mass graves containing the bodies of hundreds of slaughtered Yazidi civilians.
Meanwhile, Iraqi and coalition forces have been bogged down in the battle to liberate Mosul because of the presence of many civilians.
ISIS is using these civilians as human shields, herding them into the streets and using them as cover from airstrikes, according to the Washington Post.
At the same time, the jihadists surprise advancing troops by using car bombs, which have become their principal weapons. ISIS militants roll out these car bombs from garages, heading straight toward enemy troops.
"If there were no civilians, we'd just burn it all," Maj. Gen. Sami al-Aridhi told the Washington Post. He was forced to suspend operations in his section of the city on Nov. 7 because so many families were blocking the street.
