EXCLUSIVE: 'I Was Beaten, Starved', Former Daesh Child Slave Tells Sputnik

Eleven-year-old Ayman Sharaf Khaji was taken prisoner by Daesh terrorists for eight months before he managed to escape. In an exclusive interview to Sputnik, the boy recalled his suffering as a prisoner. Ayman along with his family and thousands of Yazidis from the city of Sinjar were captured by Daesh terrorists on August 3, 2015. These people became not just prisoners; men were victims of forced labor, whereas, women were forcibly turned into slaves. Sputnik spoke to Ayman about his life during 8 months as a Daesh prisoner and how he managed to escape. “I lived in fear, hunger and violence. I was taught to shoot a machine gun by Daesh fighters who told us that after the training, we would go and start killing Yazidis in Sinjar. They said that we were the infidels without religion,” Ayman said. There were 100 children in the camp where Ayman lived. The camp was located in the Tall Afar in Nineveh province. Recalling his life amongst the terrorists, Ayman said that once Abu Azzam, who was responsible for their training in the camp, asked him to read the Quran. “I said I do not know how to. Then another boy and I were taken to a very fat ringleader named Mohammed, who locked us in a very narrow closet with no light. After some time, 4 other boys were brought into the adjacent closet and were locked in the same way as us. All of them suffocated from lack of oxygen.” After that Ayman and the other boy were released and were told that if they do not learn to read the Koran they will be treated even worse. After sometime, Ayman was sent to the Prison of Badosh, located to the west of Mosul (the second largest prison in Iraq after Abu Ghraib). According to Ayman, there were only children, women and the elderly in this prison. “We lived in terrible unhygienic conditions. There was no food. We pleaded with the militants to bring at least some milk for small children. Then my family and I were taken to the village of Kazl Kiu at Tall Afar,” Ayman told Sputnik. He further said that they tried to escape three times. “There were 34 of us. But each time some baby started to cry and we quickly returned to our positions, fearing that we might get caught. In the end we managed to escape. We spent the whole day in wheat fields without food or water and then after it became dark, we moved on. As a result, we reached the province of Dohuk and there we were met by soldiers of Yazidi militias that fed us and gave us some clothes,” Ayman told Sputnik. Currently, the boy and his family are in a refugee camp called Sharya in northern Iraq. Ayman hopes that he will be able to go to Germany and obtain refugee status there. Read more: http://sputniknews.com/middleeast/20160404/1037475062/yazidi-boy-daesh-escape.html#ixzz453hSbw6o