Some call them ISIS, others call them Daesh. Still others refer to them as either ISIL or simply IS. Whatever these particular Islamic jihadists terrorists are called, one group they’ll not soon forget a certain Peshmerga battalion with the enigmatic name The Force of the Sun Ladies.
As reported by Mandy Appleyard of the British newspaper The Mirror on Mar. 6, 2016, the Kurdish Pershmerga army has recently stood up an all-female unit consisting of Yazidi women who’ve managed to escape the clutches of their ISIS captors. And the members of The Force of the Sun Ladies may be like no other group of combatants in the history of warfare.
Membership in the Sun Ladies Battalion is restricted to only Yazidi women who’ve escaped either certain death or sexual slavery at the hands of the ISIS jihadists. The brainchild of Khatoon Khider, now officially known as Captain Khatoon Khider of the Peshmerga Forces, proposed the all-female combat unit after she herself survived the ISIS assault and subsequent massacre of Yazidis taking refuge on Mount Sinjar during August of 2014.
Until rescued off the mountaintop by a combination of Kurdish ground forces and Western air power, the attacking Islamic jihadists butchered upwards of 5,000 Yazidi men, and sent untold thousands of Yazidi women into sexual slavery. It’s long been understood that ISIS considers the Yazidis to be devil worshipers, and they intend to kill every Yazidi on the planet of they refuse to convert to Islam.
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As cited by Appleyard, Captain Khatoon Khider was quoted, “Whenever a war wages, our women end up as the victims. Now we are defending ourselves from the evil.” The captain certainly seems itching to lead her troops into battle as the Peshmerga is poised to launch an attack on the ISIS held city of Mosul.
Regarding the thousands of innocent people still in the occupied city, Captain Khinder added, “We have a lot of our women in Mosul being held as slaves. Their families are waiting for them. We are waiting for them.”
As reported, “ISIS is still holding an estimated 3,500 people in Iraq, the majority of them women and girls from the Yazidi community. Some managed to escape when coalition forces pounded ISIS from the air and broke its siege of Mount Sinjar. But thousands starved to death or died of heatstroke. ISIS later systematically killed men, and women deemed too old or too young to be sold into sexual slavery.”
In a related story, Britain’s The Daily Mail reported on Mar. 3, 2016, word is starting to surface from ISIS-occupied territory of even more atrocities perpetuated against Yazidi sex slaves. A German medical and psychological center for victims of ISIS is releasing some of the horror stories Yazidi women and girls have had to endure.
Center director Dr. Jan Ihan Kizilhan related how his facility has treated such cases as an eight-year-old girl who was sold by ISIS “eight times during the 10 months she was held hostage, and raped her hundreds of times. This is one of the cases I always have in my mind.” Another horrific example is a child who arrived in German with burns over 80 percent of her body.
“She had no nose, no ears left,” Dr. Kizilhan said, only to be even more shocked when he learned what had happened to her. As reported, “ISIS fighters had held the girl and her sisters for weeks, raping and torturing them, before they escaped. Then one night sleeping in her tent in the refugee camp, the girl dreamt ISIS fighters were outside.”
The doctor went on to say, “In a panic she poured gasoline over herself and lit a match, hoping it would make her so ugly they would not rape her again.” Upon hearing of the plight of the child, Dr. Kizilhan had that girl on an immediate charter flight for fear she might not survive.
The little girl remains in a German hospital after more than a dozen operations. Reportedly, she will still need 30 more types of skin and bone surgeries.
