A former Iraqi lawmaker said she wants women and girls who are attempting to escape slavery forced on them by the Islamic State militants "to be rescued" before they take their own lives.
Ameena Saeed Hassan, who runs a network that offers a lifeline for captured Yazidi women to plot an escape from the brutal hands of the ISIS, told CNN that while she had smuggled more than a hundred women out to safety, she has been "haunted by the thought of those she could not save."
"We just want them to be rescued,'' he said in an interview with CNN. "Hundreds of girls have committed suicide.''
"I have some pictures of the girls who have committed suicide ... when they lose hope for rescue and when ISIS many times sell them and rape them ... I think there is maybe 100. We lost contact with most of them."
"I cannot sleep, I cannot forget what has happened to them," she said.
"[They ask] When will you rescue us? But I don't have the answer. I'm not a government. I'm not anything. I'm just people. It's very difficult."
Hassan's helpline takes calls from the women and reportedly arranges for them to be brought to safety. Her husband, Khalil, usually makes the dangerous journey to the Iraq-Syria border to bring them there, CNN reported.
Amnesty International said hundreds of women and girls from the Yazidi religious minority in northern Iraq who were often so desperate to escape captivity commit suicide rather than remain enslaved by the ISIS militants.
Those who had fled captivity and have publicly shared the unspeakable cruelty of the barbaric group said they were raped, tortured, drugged with morphine to stay silent, forced to have abortions and even fed to dogs.
Girls ages 14, 15 and even younger have reportedly been used as sex slaves. Those who refused to have sex with the ISIS soldiers were executed, a CNN report said.
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.
ISIS has carried out the "systematic sexual crimes' against girls from the Yazidi community since kidnapping over 200 of them from their homes in northern Iraq last August. The United Nations has accused ISIS of committing genocide against the Yazidis.
The lawmaker, who is also a Yazidi and from Sinjar, where some of the captured women came from, has reportedly lamented the plight of fellow Yazidi women, some of whom were close to her.
Hassan's work for the ISIS slaves has been recognised with an award from the US State Department, according to CNN.
