‘I want them to be punished’: Alleged Yazidi slave on ISIS brides

A Yazidi woman’s courage has exposed the alleged dark secrets of an Australian ISIS family accused of slavery and systematic abuse in Syria.

Police with one of the ISIS brides on Friday. Picture: AFP

Among the small community of Australian ISIS wives in Syria’s al-Roj internment camp, there had long been rumours that the Abbas family had secrets, things they had done inside the moral void of the Islamic State caliphate they did not want the world to know.

On Thursday night, as Kawsar Abbas, 53, her adult daughters Zahra, 33, and Zeinab, 31, and their eight children landed at Melbourne’s Tullamarine airport on a Qatar flight from Damascus, those secrets finally spilled out as the Australian Federal Police revealed the Melbourne grandmother and one daughter had been arrested on slavery-related crimes-against-humanity charges.

It has taken years and the courage of a woman who has allegedly suffered an unspeakable ordeal – to expose the dark heart of an Australian family accused of keeping a female slave during their time in Syria, and of looking the other way as the family patriarch is alleged to have repeatedly dragged her into a room and raped her.

Just hours before Kawsar and Zeinab faced Melbourne Magistrates Court on Friday to be formally charged, and another ISIS bride Janai Safar was refused bail in Sydney on charges including being a member of a terrorist organisation, the woman from Iraq’s persecuted Yazidi minority spoke to The Australian of the hell she allegedly endured at the hands of a ­couple who claimed to have moved to one of the 21st century’s most brutal conflict zones to do god’s work.

Australian Federal Police officers arrest a woman in connection with alleged crimes against humanity offences. Picture: AFP

Like many survivors of extreme abuse, she speaks clinically of being used as a slave by all ­members of the household – ­Kawsar, her five daughters and one son – and of the alleged sexual abuse by Kawsar’s husband and charity worker, Mohammad Ahmad.

Now in her 20s and living in Europe, she says she is happy to hear of charges being laid.

“I want them to be punished for what they did to me. I want them to pay for that,” she says.

“But on the other side I am scared because I have seen what they can do and that makes me worried. Because of what happened to me in the past, I am afraid it will happen again in the future.”

Like thousands of fellow Yazidi women and girls, Nareen (a pseudonym) was kidnapped from northern Iraq’s Sinjar region near the Syrian border as a young ­teenager when ISIS fighters ­overran the historic enclave of the Kurdish-speaking, religious minority.

As many as 5000 Yazidi men were killed and more than 6000 women and children taken as spoils: the boys to be used as fighters, the girls and women traded on the ISIS slave market in Syria.

To read the 2016 UN report on Islamic State’s genocidal crimes as they were still unfolding against the Yazidis is an extreme exercise in endurance.

It describes how Yazidi women and girls in slave market halls and prisons “would scratch and bloody themselves in an attempt to make themselves unattractive to potential buyers”; it documents cases in which ISIS fighters murdered the young children of enslaved mothers to punish them for resistance, and how girls as young as nine were sold as sex slaves.

Nareen and her sister were the only members of their family to survive the 2014 ISIS genocide.

Former home affairs secretary Mike Pezzullo says the charges laid against returning ISIS brides will take a “considerable amount of time” to go through the courts.

Enslaved, raped, tortured and traded between 12 ISIS men for the next five years, she had already ­endured hell by the time she says she was bought in 2017 by a broker and on-sold to Ahmad, Abbas and their family.

She tried to be obedient, to avoid the inevitable beatings that would come with defiance, but there was no way to avoid the sexual abuse, she says.

In 2019, Mohammad Ahmad told the ABC from a Syrian prison that his late son Omar had bought a Yazidi slave but that the family had treated her “like a daughter” and it “was nothing”. In 2023, still behind bars, he denied her accusations of rape. “He’s lying,” Nareen says. “When they took me to the house, not long after that his son was martyred. He (Ahmad) had taken me for himself, not for his son. He’s lying.”

It is inconceivable to her – “impossible – that a man she accuses of repeatedly raping her over the 18 months he kept her as a ­family slave could say he treated her like a daughter. But of course he would say that, she then reasons.

“He would not say he had taken me for rape and torture because it would not be good for him in the future,” she said. “But it is the truth. He considered me his sex slave.”

She says no one in the family showed her kindness, alleging that “Kawsar treated me very badly” and that the sexual abuse she ­suffered at the hands of Ahmad — whom she called Abu Omar (father of Omar), only multiplied her problems with his wife.

“Kawsar knew about (the rapes). Of course she knew,” alleges Nareen. “The house was not big and he would tell her when he was coming home.

“When her husband would abuse me she would get very angry with me. Sometimes she accused me of agreeing to it, which I didn’t, and it would make her very angry. She would speak in English at those times but I didn’t understand what she was saying.”

Most of the time, she alleges, the family would speak to her in ­Arabic, ordering her to do chores from early morning to midnight after they went to bed.

The work was relentless, and on one occasion she recalls being “so tired I went up to the second floor of the house to rest”.

“Zahra asked me to do some washing but I told her I had just got upstairs and could I do it in 30 minutes?” she says.

“Abu Omar heard what I said and came upstairs and pulled me down by the hair. He beat me and told me I have to do whatever I am told.”

Eighteen months after the ­family bought her, Nareen was back on the slave market and sold to a Nigerian fighter, she says.

It was only when the ISIS caliphate in northeast Syria fell in 2019 that she was freed, but it would take years before she would have the chance to tell her story to Australian authorities.

She did so in 2023 to an AFP ­officer who has kept in touch as the agency methodically gathered the evidence it now hopes will lead to Australia’s first ever crimes against humanity prosecution.

AFP assistant commissioner Stephen Nutt. Picture: Martin Ollman

While legal experts have warned that the evidentiary bar for a conviction will be very high, AFP assistant commissioner Stephen Nutt said on Thursday night he believed they had enough evidence to meet that threshold.

A second Yazidi woman, a key witness in the case who has also given extensive testimony to the AFP, told the ABC in 2023 she was brought to the home of Ahmad, whom she too knew as “Abu Omar”, when she was 13 for a three-day trial.

“If they liked my work, they were going to buy me,” the second woman said.

They didn’t. She forgot to do the dishes and was locked in a room for 12 hours without food and finally returned to her former ISIS captor.

“I was their slave and they could do whatever they wanted to me,” she said. ”My life was controlled by them. It felt like my existence did not matter.”

Both women say they are willing to testify against Kawsar and her daughter, believed to be ­Zeinab, who now face potential maximum jail terms of up to 100 years and 50 years respectively for their alleged roles in one of ­humanity’s most enduring and egregious crimes.