EXCLUSIVE: Up to 60 girls per MONTH committing suicide following vile Islamic State abuse
UP TO sixty girls per month are taking their own lives in refugee camps following torture and sexual abuse by Islamic State fighters, it has been claimed.
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GETTY•APIslamic State fighters have waged a war of terror on anyone they consider to be 'un-Islamic', including the Yazidi community who follow an ancient religion.
The terror group have taken hundreds of women and children hostage before subjecting their victims to torture and sexual abuse.
Speaking to Express.co.uk, an aid worker wishing to be identified only as ‘Yousif’, said he witnessed traumatised youngsters committing suicide at a rate of one or two a day.
He said: “Everyday between one or two commit suicide.
“There are different methods they use inside there, whether they hang themselves, cut themselves, different ways they do it.
Yousif, who is based in Canada, said the girls were driven to end their own lives because of “shame and honour”.
Many believe their families will reject them, especially the victims of the worst abuse, after they are released from Islamic State capture.
The claim is backed up by a report released this week, which details the high levels of suicide in make-shift Yazidi refugee camps established in the Kurdish region of Iraq.
Last summer, as many as 5,000 Yazidi men were massacred in the Iraqi city of Sinjar by the Islamic State while hundreds of women were captured or sold into sexual slavery.
Campaign group Human Rights Watch says women and girls attempted suicide to avoid rape, forced marriage, or forced religious conversion at the hands of the Islamic State.
The report includes accounts of girls trying to electrocute themselves in bathtubs or consuming what they thought was poison.
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Yousif, who came into contact with the girl, said she had been transferred to Germany to be treated by doctors who fear how her body will cope with pregnancy at such a young age.
He said: “She is very tiny. If she delivers naturally or by caesarean, she will die.
“Her life was in jeopardy, they worry more about her life than the baby she is carrying.”
He added: “Nobody knows after that what is going to happen.
“Isis was the father, she had been raped by more than nine or ten men.”
The aid worker, who withheld his real name for fear of reprisals in Iraq, said many of the women and young girls left pregnant by Islamic State fighters were encouraged to abort their babies, or place their newborns in orphanages.
He continued: “There were different reactions, some of them [among the Yazidi community] said abort the babies, others said we don't want to do anything with them, some of them said they want them [the mothers] to get married to young people.”
“Adoption is rejected, because they will be in the hands of Christians,” he said.
“It is considered that these babies are Muslim babies.
“They don't want those babies to be adopted by Christians, adoption is against their religion.”
Aid organisations estimate that hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced by the fighting, and Yousif gave a depressing account of the conditions refugees are forced to endure.
He said some families were living in unfinished or abandoned buildings or large camps made up of thousands of tents on the outskirts of towns.
He added that those who managed to make it safely to a city faced the risk of being targeted by Islamic State "sleeper cells" lying dormant until given an order to attack.
"They are inside, they are just waiting for an order to blow up a populated area," he said.
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