The Catholic News Agency described the stories shared by human rights activists at the #WeAreN2016 international congress on religious freedom as “graphic, brutal and raw.”
“One account told of a couple whose children had been captured by ISIS militants. When they answered their door one day, they found a plastic bag on their doorstep. It contained the body parts of their daughters and a video of them being raped and tortured,” the report described.
Another account shared that IS fighters in Mosul, Iraq, came to the house of a Christian woman, threatening her to leave or pay the jizya tax. Before the woman could leave the house with her daughter, who was in the shower at the time, the militants torched the house, burning the daughter alive.
The girl reportedly died in her mother’s arms, with her last words being “Forgive them.”
A Yazidi teenage girl, 15-year-old Samia Sleman, spoke about her six months in IS captivity, revealing that there are thousands of women and girls being held as sex slaves by the extremists. What is more, the jihadists rape girls as young as 7 years of age, and force them to convert to Islam.
“Why are these innocent kids and these innocent people suffering this much in that region?” Sleman asked.
“Why don’t we see any action being taken? Even though it’s been over a year and a half now, we’ve seen horrible things happen to us minorities, especially Yazidis and Christians, in that region, and we don’t see the international community taking concrete actions against the Islamic State.”