Hanan is not the woman’s real name. Though now in Turkey, not her native Syria, the 26-year-old is still so terrified and traumatized that she has not left her relatives’ house once since she arrived three weeks ago.
Hanan says she was forced to marry an ISIS fighter in exchange for her father’s freedom.
Her large, dark brown eyes, all that is visible under her niqab, well with tears. A sob betrays a depth of pain that even the suffocating black fabric of her veil cannot mask.
“I am sorry, but when I remember … ,” she says. Her voice fades as she slightly lifts the veil to wipe her face.
When ISIS militants swept through her city in eastern Syria, Hanan says, they indiscriminately detained anyone suspected of fighting them.
Hanan’s brother had been killed in previous clashes. Her father had kept his son’s AK-47 assault rifle in memory of him.
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Hanan’s parents fled to an area controlled by the Syrian regime. Hanan, using routes she won’t disclose for security reasons, managed to get to relatives in Turkey.
“I don’t know how many like me he had, I don’t know how many like me there are,” she says of the husband forced on her. “They take whatever they want. They marry and divorce at will.”
An activist group named Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently has documented hundreds of cases of women being forced into marriage with ISIS fighters. About a third of them are under the age of 18.
Hanan says that once a girl turns 13, she will rarely leave the house. She remains imprisoned by fear of becoming the next bride, the next slave, the next prize claimed by ISIS under the guise of “marriage.”
Hanan says her experience has shredded her soul and stripped her of her dignity.
“Even now I cannot grasp what I have been through, that I went through this. I am destroyed.”
