• The Lives of Girls and Women

• • Art for Progress
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• 3 years ago
• The Macaluso Sisters, courtesy of Glass Half Full Media Many of us are familiar with the horrific 2014 attacks by Islamic State fighters (ISIS) on the Yazidi Kurdish minority in northern Iraq, from various news stories. Especially reprehensible were the forced “marriages” of Yazidi girls and young women to ISIS soldiers, who basically used them as sex slaves. Now, MTV Documentary Films brings us right into that incomprehensible world with Sabaya (a term loosely translated as "sex slave"), a riveting documentary by Kurdish/Swedish director Hogir Hirori. Guarded by Kurdish forces, 73,000 ISIS supporters are held in the Al-Hol Camp in Syria, along with many of the Yazidi women and girls they have abducted. Many of these women—several of whom witnessed their families being murdered by their captors—were taken in their early teens and have spent their entire adolescence enslaved. Sabaya follows an incredibly intrepid and determined group of volunteer Yazidis who repeatedly risk their lives trying to rescue as many women and girls as possible from Al-Hol, considered the most dangerous camp in the Middle East. Sabaya, Courtesy of MTV Documentary Films Mahmud and Ziyad of the Yazidi Home Center lead the rescue group, whose mission it is to bring the girls back home to their families, or whatever is left of them. Constantly monitoring their phones and almost as often losing cell service, the two men patiently plot nighttime raids on the camp, armed with guns and[...]
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