This week, another exhumation of seven mass graves took place in the village of Hardan. The hunt for their remains is ongoing as the Iraqi government continues to exhume dozens of mass graves across Sinjar. The orgy of rape and bloodletting is thought to have claimed at least 10,000 Yazidi lives and is officially recognized as a genocide by the United Nations and numerous other international bodies. Myriad accounts of their plight have seeped out since, with Nadia Murad, the Nobel Prize laureate who is also from Kocho, among the first females to speak out on the horrors endured by the dwindling religious minority that was brutally persecuted for centuries and vilified as devil worshippers. The younger women and girls were herded off to Mosul and Syria to be marketed as sexual slaves or “sabayas.” Women deemed beyond childbearing age filled them, too, in a gruesome exercise repeated across Sinjar. She is from Kocho, the mud-caked village in the Yazidi-dominated Sinjar region to which the jihadis laid siege in August 2014, rounding up hundreds of men, pumping bullets into them and dumping them in large holes.
Sipan Ajo emerged six months ago from seven years of captivity in Syria. A jumble of shoes were piled outside the door of the apartment she shares with three brothers, two sisters and a pet bunny. “Welcome,” she said, leading a woman reporter and an Arabic-language translator to the first floor of a modest house near the local cemetery. Her smile was serene, her eyes at once gentle and sad. We met her on a recent morning in a small town in southwest Germany, home of the eponymous guard dog the Rottweiler and a swelling population of refugees. Her real name is Sipan, after a mountain in her native Sinjar in northern Iraq. He relished killing and bred Arab horses. The Syrian from Idlib was the Islamic State’s chief strategist and official spokesman, a brute in the bedroom as in the battlefield. She was enslaved by Baghdadi’s most trusted lieutenant, Abu Muhammad al-Adnani.
ROTTWEIL, Germany - They called her Baqiya, Arabic for “she who remains.” She moved in the highest echelons of the Islamic State, serving Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi tea, pricking her ears as the former “caliph” and his top commanders planned attacks, playing with his children and accompanying his main wife, “Um Khaled,” to ladies’ dos.
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