ISIS is selling Yazidi women and children as slaves on Turkish soil

Gatestone has the story:

This month, the German television station, ARD (Consortium of Public Broadcasters in Germany), produced footage documenting the slave trade being conducted by the Islamic State (ISIS) through a liaison office in the province of Gaziantep (also known as Antep) in Turkey, near the border with Syria.

In August 2014, Islamic State jihadists attacked Sinjar, home to over 400,000 Yazidis. The United Nations confirmed that 5,000 men were executed, and as many as 7,000 women and girls made sex slaves.

While some have escaped or been ransomed back, thousands of Yazidis remain missing.

Last month, after Kurdish forces recaptured the area from ISIS jihadists, mass graves, believed to contain the remains of Yazidi women, were discovered east of Sinjar.

The German TV channels NDR and SWR declared on their website:

“IS [Islamic State] offers women and underage children in a kind of virtual slave market with for-sale photos. … The transfer of money, as the reporter discovered, takes place through a liaison office in Turkey. …

“For weeks, NDR and SWR accompanied a Yazidi negotiator, who, on behalf of the families, negotiates with the IS for the release of the slaves and their children. … the women are sold in a digital slave market to the highest bidder. 15,000 to 20,000 US dollars are a typical price. Similar sums for ransom are also required to free Yazidis. The money is then transferred via IS-liaison offices and middlemen to the terrorist group.

“NDR and SWR were present at the liberation of a woman and her three small children, aged between two and four years old, and followed the negotiations. How many Yazidi slaves are still ‘owned’ by IS is unclear. Experts estimate that there still could be hundreds.”

The negotiator told NDR and SWR that in the course of a year, he transferred more than USD $2.5 million to ISIS from the families of 250 Yazidi women and children, in order to free them.

He also said that to advertise the slaves, ISIS assigns numbers to the female and child slaves, and posts their photographs on the WhatsApp Messenger smartphone app.[1]

In response to these reports, the Gaziantep Bar Association filed a criminal complaint against “Turkey’s National Intelligence Organization (MIT) and law-enforcement officers that have committed neglect of duty and misconduct by not taking required measures, and not carrying out preventive and required intelligence activities before the media covered the said incidents.”

The bar association also demanded that the prosecutors start prosecuting and punishing perpetrators engaged in crimes of “human trafficking, prostitution, genocide, deprivation of liberty, crimes against humanity, and migrant smuggling,” according to the Turkish penal code.

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