야지디족 16세 소녀 “IS 성노예돼 한사람씩 연이어 성폭행 당했다”
* ‘아시아엔’ 연수 외국기자가 작성한 기사의 한글요약본과 원문을 함께 게재합니다.
[아시아엔=라드와 아시라프 기자·번역 최정아 기자] 이슬람 극단주의 무장단체 이슬람국가(IS)에 납치돼 성적 유린을 당한 야지디족 소녀들이 영국 런던에서 끔찍했던 경험을 털어놨다.
2014년 8월 이라크 북부 신자르에서 IS에 납치된 뒤 최근 극적으로 탈출한 야지디족 16세 소녀는 “아직도 많은 야지디족 소녀들이 IS에 납치돼 있다. 이들은 야지디족을 노예로 삼아 학살, 강간을 일삼고 있다”며 “사는 게 아니었다. 나는 운이 좋게도 IS의 손을 벋어났지만, 아직도 수많은 사람들이 IS의 손아귀에 있다”고 밝혔다.
또다른 야지디족 소녀는 “수많은 야지디족이 잔혹한 성폭행에 노출돼있다. 보통 한 남성에게 당하면, 또다른 남성에게 연이어 당한다”고 밝혔다.
이번 컨퍼런스를 주최한 바로네스 엠마 니콜슨 아마르(Amar) 회장은 “야지디족 소녀들에게 심리적 치료와 사회적 지원이 필요하다”며 “영국 정부는 전쟁지역에서 발생되는 성폭행을 예방할 수 있도록 지원해야 한다”고 강조했다.
A petition to save Yazidi women in Iraq
In a conference by the British charity “Amar” on the urgent need to address mental health issues amongst refugees and internally displaced people in the Middle East, a 16-year-old Iraqi Yazidi girl kidnapped by the Islamic State group, Nihad talked of her experience of being raped by jihadists and then forced to abandon her baby to flee in a 14-month ordeal that has left her struggling to cope.
Speaking in London after having escaped her captors, she appealed for help for those who remained trapped and for her Yazidi community, a minority which IS has targeted for massacres, enslavement and rape in northern Iraq.
“It’s not a life. We are not living until the rest of our people are saved from Daesh,” Nihad Bakarat Alawsi told AFP, using an Arabic name for IS.
The teenager was kidnapped with 28 members of her family in Sinjar in northern Iraq in August 2014 during a persecution campaign by IS jihadists, who consider the Yazidis heretical.
Baroness Emma Nicholson, the charity’s chairman, spoke of the “great, great need of psycho-social help as well as physical help” for the displaced.
The jihadists took her and around 300 Yazidi families were taken to a school in Hassake in Syria, a town close to the Iraqi border. She said some of her family managed to escape when their two cars were stopped at a checkpoint as they tried to flee to the mountains for safety.
She spoke of her experience being exposed to rape, sexual violence from a big number of people, and being handed over from one man’s hand to another.
This comes after Rosyen, a girl with British and Iraqi passports issued an online petition targeting the British government asking them to step in and help Yazidi women in need. Her petition garnered over 30,000 signatures from people all over the world.
She wrote a long statement detailing the dilemma the Yazidi women have been going through for years. She asked the British government to keep their promise during the latest world summit on sexual violence in war-conflicted areas, as Britain promised to extort more efforts in providing sexual violence victims especially kids with protection and care.