The couple who rescue women and children from IS

A Yazidi-Iraqi woman and her husband are risking their lives to save women and girls being kept as prisoners by the so-called Islamic State.

Islamic State

The couple communicate with the trapped women on their mobile phones. Source: CNN

A Yazidi-Iraqi woman has made it her mission to rescue as many women and girls as she can from the Islamic State.

Amena Saeed Hassan, an Iraqi MP, receives calls every day from women inside the Islamic State pleading for help to escape.

She and her husband Khaleel al Dakh work as a team to save them - she takes the calls and he arranges the dangerous rescue missions. Together they have saved more than 100 women and children.

Ms Hassan told CNN there were still many being held in terrible circumstances.

"When they lose hope for rescue and when ISIS many times sells them and rapes them," she said.

She said that when the Islamic State captured Mosul, she thought the Yazidi on Mount Sinjar would be safe.

"We said, 'Why would they come to Sinjar? Because there is no oil or anything'."

But ISIS did come for the Yazidi, capturing the women and children and killing the men.

Many of the families turned to Ms Hassan for help.

"People know me," she said. "I am from Sinjar and also I am Yazidi. I know many people who were kidnapped."

One of her first rescues was a 35-year-old woman with six children who were all bought and sold in the Islamic State's slave markets.

But she told CNN it was the voices of women waiting to be rescued that haunted her.

"[They ask], 'When will you rescue us?'

"But I don’t have the answer. I'm not government. I'm not anything.

"I'm just a person."


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Source: SBS


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The couple who rescue women and children from IS | SBS News