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Jinan, 18, a Yazidi, was captured early last year and held by Islamic State militants for three months before she managed to flee, she said on a visit to Paris ahead of the publication tomorrow of a book about her ordeal. Seized as militants swept through northern regions inhabited by the Yazidi religious minority, Jinan was moved between several locations before being bought by two men, a former policeman and an imam, she said. She described how she and other Yazidi prisoners were locked up in a house. “They tortured us, tried to forcefully convert us. If we refused we were beaten, chained outdoors in the sun, forced to drink water with dead mice in it. Sometimes they threatened to torture us with electricity,” she said. “These men are not human. They only think of death, killing. They take drugs constantly. They seek vengeance against everyone. They say that one day Islamic State will rule over the whole world,” she said.
In the book, Jinan describes how once, in Mosul, she was led into “a massive reception hall with large columns ... dozens of women were gathered there.” “The fighters circulated among us, laughing raucously, pinching our backsides,” she wrote in DAESH’s Slave, using an Arabic acronym for the Islamic State, which was formerly known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. She said one man complained, saying: “That one has big breasts, but I want a Yazidi with blue eyes and pale skin. Those are the best apparently. I am willing to pay the price.” During such “slave markets” she said she saw Iraqis and Syrians, but also Westerners whose nationality she could not discern.
Author Jinan poses for a photograph in Paris
The best-looking girls were reserved for the bosses or wealthy clients from Gulf nations, she said. Once she was sold, Jinan said her days were punctuated by men’s visits to the house where she was imprisoned with other women. Fighters came to make their purchases in the foyer where traders acted as intermediaries between the slave owners and emirs who inspected the “livestock,” Jinan wrote in the book, which was written with the help of French journalist Thierry Oberle. “I will exchange your Beretta pistol for the brunette,” one of the traders said. “If you prefer to pay cash, it is [US]$150. You can also pay in Iraqi dinars.”
Convinced that she did not speak Arabic, Janin’s two owners spoke freely in front of her and one night she heard a conversation revealing the extent to which the slave trade is run like a business. “A man cannot purchase more than three women unless he is from Syria, Turkey or a Gulf nation,” said one, named Abou Omar. “It’s good for business,” replied the other, Abou Anas. “A Saudi buyer has transport and food costs that a member of the Islamic State does not. He has a higher quota to make his purchases profitable.” “It is a good deal: The Islamic State increases its profits to support the mujahidin and our foreign brothers are satisfied,” the book quoted Anas as saying. After escaping using a set of stolen keys, Jinan made her way back to her husband and is now living in a Yazidi refugee camp in Iraqi Kurdistan. “If we go back home, there will be other genocides against us. The only solution is that we have a region to ourselves, under international protection,” she said.
Teenager describes Islamic State-run slave market - Taipei Times
In many poor countries, environmental destruction is the tipping point that pushes vulnerable families into slavery. Unseasonal droughts, encroaching deserts, extreme flooding, the death of livestock, or illegal deforestation have a devastating impact on families already living on the brink. As their fragile livelihoods become unsustainable, such families may start to gamble with their liberty. Desperate parents accept offers from unscrupulous “recruiters” to employ their daughters in hotels, often suspecting that the offers are too good to be true, but hoping against hope that their daughters won’t end up in the sex trade, or that sons who are offered “light work” and access to schooling won’t be forced to work double shifts in embroidery factories or road building. Sadly, and all too often, however, that is the outcome.
In India, Nepal and Pakistan, entire families forced off the land end up working as bonded labourers in brick kilns or stone quarries after they are coerced with fraudulent loans into years – and often decades – of servitude. Slave labour is also deployed in work that destroys the environment – thereby perpetuating the cycle of devastation and exploitation. In Thailand, desperate migrants from Myanmar and Cambodia are enslaved on fishing boats to strip the oceans of fish, damaging the marine environment. Or in Brazil, gangs of young men are trapped by debt in work illegally logging the Amazon forest (pdf), endangering the livelihoods of indigenous groups. Brick kilns in India, operated by bonded labourers, are fuelled with old tyres and used motor oil, spewing carcinogens and other pollutants into the air.
Slave labour is used for such work because destroying the environment for profit is often difficult, dirty and dangerous. The criminal gangs perpetrating these abuses are not willing to pay the wages required to attract and retain workers for this difficult and unpleasant work. Instead, they deceive and coerce vulnerable men, women and children into servitude so that they can extract maximum profit from their exploitation. More often than not, the destruction is also illegal so perpetrators have an incentive to use illegal, forced labour – thereby avoiding the scrutiny of authorities.
So what should done to end these abuses? Clearly, there are no easy answers to such complex and deep-rooted problems. But just as clearly, groups fighting modern-day slavery and those striving to protect the environment will make much more effective progress if they collaborate more closely on their mutual goals – and their shared objective of increasing the resilience of vulnerable communities and their environment. In his recent address to the US Congress, Pope Francis referred to this kind of collaboration, saying: “Cooperation is a powerful resource in the battle to eliminate new global forms of slavery, born of grave injustices which can be overcome only through new policies and new forms of social consensus.”
Perpetrators of modern slavery are devastating our environment too | Nick Grono
