A YOUNG Yazidi woman is to appeal to Scots MPs and MSPs for more aid to go to refugee camps whiled describing the torture and rape she suffered at the hands of Isis militants, who abducted her as “war booty” and held her for three months.
Nadia Murad Basee Taha, 21, was among more than 5,000 Yazidi women taken captive when Isis swept through the group’s territories in northern Iraq.
She is speaking out about her horrific experiences at the hands of Isis fighters, who bought and sold her and women like her as “sabia” – slaves.
Ms Taha, who says she was taken as a sex slave by the Islis militant group, is due to meet Alex Salmond, the SNP's international affairs and Europe spokesman in the House of Commons on Tuesday.
She is to meet some MPs on Monday and is due to attend Prime Minister's Questions on Wednesday.
There are hopes that she will be meeting David Cameron and there are are also plans to meet some MSPs at Holyrood.
Scots charity worker Fiona Bennett has been instrumental in setting the meetings up.
"I wanted to raise awareness, and funds but my main objective at the time was to make people aware of what was happening to this tiny minority of people. Genocide," she said.
Ms Bennett, a former psychiatric nurse from Ardchattan, Argyll and Bute has already raised over £5000 for the US charity Yazda, which sends aid to refugees in Iraq, through the gofundme.com website.
The money raised is due to be used to provide medical care, sanitary products and psychological help for the victims of sexual violence. Ms Taha has testified in December before the UN in New York, to raise awareness of the plight of the Iraqi and Syrian peoples and urge more action to protect refugees from the conflict with Isis.
She described how last summer she was a student living in the village of Kocho in northern Iraq when Isis fighters rounded up all Yazidis, killing 312 men in an hour and taking the younger women into slavery.
After being taken to Mosul, Ms Taha and the others were held for three days before being “distributed” among fighters.
Some women killed themselves, but Ms Taha said she never considered doing so. She said: “I did not want to kill myself — but I wanted them to kill me.”
Ms Taha breaks down as she tells her harrowing story
She was taken as a slave by a man with a wife and daughter, who Ms Taha never met, and kept in a single room.
After one failed escape attempt, she told the UN, she was beaten up and gang raped by six militants as a form of punishment. “They continued to commit crimes to my body until I became unconscious,” she said.
Ms Taha escaped successfully in November 2014, after three months of abuse and torture, and made her way via a refugee camp to seek asylum in Stuttgart.
Ms Bennett (right) has already spoken to the First Minister about her campaign.
She said: "The thing that horrified me the most was the ISIS treatment of Yazidi women and girls. Life as a Yazidi woman living at the hands of ISIS, I cannot think of anything more like hell.
"Reading a first hand account of girls as young as seven being raped. Public gang rapes and slave markets. It stops me sleeping at night.
"Women trying to kill themselves so that they can escape ISIS. Begging to be bombed so their hell would end.
"I looked for a charity to donate to and I learned that women were escaping to refugee camps and were in desperate need of gynecological treatment and psychological care. Children with no food, babies with no milk, their mother's milk drying up.
"As a Yazidi former ISIS captive now living in Germany Nadia's objective is to tell the entire world what is happening to the Yazidi and Christian minorities at the hands of ISIS."
Nadia Murad Basee Taha speaks to the UN Security Council
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