A Hell For Women And Children

"The rails all had the traces of the blood of women and children, from Tal Abyad to Arab Punar [Ayn-al Arab or Kobani]. Parts of human bodies torn apart by the train cars were scattered on both sides. Turkish gendarmes would make people sit on the rails during the night transfers. These poor people from Anatolian highlands (Harput, Siverek, Çermik) did not know what a railway or a train was, and they would fall asleep to wake up to the roar of the train. Always, the locomotive would have to stop because of corpses. The mutilated corpses would be cleared off the rails so that the train could go on." (p. 61, L'Agonie d'un peuple, Hayg Toroyan, Zabel Essayan, 2013, Garnier)
"The Suruç plain is an arid, stony, grassless and vast flatland. Sixty-thousand Armenians from all over the Anatolian plateau were gathered together there by the government. Their fate was in the hands of a few gendarmes and a lieutenant. Death was running rampant on the plain. With the consent of the gendarmes, Kurds and Turks of nearby villages would regularly raid the plain to abduct or buy girls or boys. Misery and hunger were at such a level that people lost their sense of decency and morality. They bought and sold their own kids among themselves and begged Kurds to become their servants." (p. 64, L'Agonie d'un peuple)
"Islamic State soldiers may take Yazidi women as concubines or sell them." From an article titled "The revival of slavery before the hour," in Dabiq, the theoretical journal for the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) -- No. 4, pp. 14-17 (https://ia801403.us.archive.org/0/items/Dabiq04En/Dabiq_04_en.pdf).
The article notes that Yazidis, as "mushrikin," don't have any rights and therefore deserve any treatment they receive from ISIL. Yazidi women and children are shared among ISIL fighters according to Shariah law.
The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) reports that since August 2014, 5,000 men have been killed by ISIL. Of these, 4,800 could be identified. A total of 7,000 women or girls were abducted, and 350,000 Yazidis were displaced. In addition to mass murders, women were subjected to sexual or physical harassment, and dozens of women committed suicide in order not to be enslaved by ISIL. Hundreds of children starved to death. Three thousand five hundred women and children are kept at five camps in Tal Afar alone. Those who manage to escape report that some women were forced to marry aged or senior ISIL members, and many were raped and forced to witness the ill-treatment to their relatives.
For more information see: http://www.hrw.org/news/2014/10/11/iraq-forced-marriage-conversion-yezidis
And here is a website that regularly reports about this nightmare is: http://newsmotion.org/tags/kurds
Suruç, Jarabulus, Nusaybin, Arab Punar, Ras al-Ayn, Tal Afar, Tal Abyad, Maskanah, Ar-Raqqah, Hatise and finally Deir ez-Zor. You may have heard some of them, but you have probably heard many in connection with ISIL's advance. They are the killing fields of today and yesterday in northern Mesopotamia.
History that is written categorically by males never mentions the fate of women and children. Their lives, spared by men, are beds of nails, in the simplest terms. They are always supposed to be sold just like a commodity, to be raped, enslaved or taken as concubine or co-wife by the murderers of their husbands. They are supposed to continue to give life in spite of everything and stay alive. Their stories were not told a century ago and if they are told today no one cares about them. They are the greatest taboos.
The Armenian genocide is the mother of all genocidal massacres in the Middle East. It is characterized by immeasurable destruction, rape, de-personification through rape and assimilation of women and forced Islamization. Today it is the fate of Yazidis. Don't just watch the hecatomb, don't be silent.

CENGİZ AKTAR (Cihan/Today's Zaman)