By Judit Neurink

DUHOK, Kurdistan Region – The world cannot remain silent about crimes committed by the Islamic State (IS) against women and girls in Iraq, said Pakhshan Zangana, head of the High Council of Women Affairs in the Kurdistan Region.

“We need strong resolutions from the United Nations and the European Union condemning what happens to our women and children,” she said, calling for the world to speak out against the kidnapping of women and children by the jihadi militants.

The exact number of victims remains unknown, but hundreds of women and children are still held captive. Women are forced to marry or are victims of rape; children are gathered in orphanages or given to Muslim families to raise. Witnesses have said they have seen girls as young as 13 sexually abused.

“These are crimes against humanity,” Zangana said, “and against everything else, even religion.”

Women have reported being imprisoned in big buildings in IS bastions like Mosul, and being raped daily and repeatedly.

A 17-year old who was interviewed by phone by the Italian newspaper La Repubblica said that her captors gave phones to women to let the world know what is happening to them.

"To hurt us even more, they told us to describe in detail to our parents what they are doing,” the young woman said. “They laugh at us because they think they are invincible.”

Yezidi women have in slowly growing numbers recently been able to escape prisons and slavery by the IS. Some appear to have been freed when IS fighters holding them fled after US airstrikes.

Local aid workers in the region of Duhok in Iraqi Kurdistan say they know of 29 women who have recently been reunited with their families, but that they expect unreported numbers to be higher.

In some instances IS members had shown remorse and given women the chance to flee, escaped victims reported.

A 16-year old who spoke to Rudaw said that civilians had broken open the house that was her prison when the captors were away.

The Yezidi girl said she was transported last month from a village in the Shingal area to a number of different places, ending up in Mosul. There, she was pressured to convert to Islam by way of diminishing food rations. When the women held captive with her decided to pretend to convert, they were given Quran lessons.

Then strangers started to come and take the girls, the prettiest first. Others were given to IS leaders. “We would hear them say to their emirs: this is our gift to you,” said the teenager, who together with another girl who became her companion was recently reunited with her family.

Zangana expressed disbelief about the silence of Arab and Islamic states “about these crimes made under the flag of ‘there is no God but Allah.’”

She called on countries that have supported IS in the past, and all those that have some influence with the radical group, to push for the release of all women and children.

Kurdish government institutions are working to solve the case of the kidnapped women, but reports that they are buying women back from IS are not true, Zangana stressed. “We want to save them, but it’s not even in our power to find them.”

She called on all those holding the women let them return to their families, and “to realize they are not slaves but human beings, with mothers, sisters, daughters.”

There have been some stories of women who were bought from the IS by Arabs and then returned home safely in secret.

Zangana also stressed that women and girls returned from IS prisons should be taken back by their communities and not ostracized in any way for the sexual abuse forced on them.

“We ask the leaders of all the communities involved -- Yezidi, Turkmen, Shabak, Christian -- to make clear to their flock that they should be looked upon as victims, and not as if they are guilty for the terrible things that have been done to them.”

Rudaw