5-Y-O Iraqi Christian Girl Kidnapped by ISIS Returns to Family 3 Years Later
About three years after being abducted by the Islamic State terror group, a 5-year-old Iraqi Christian girl has returned to her parents, who will soon celebrate her sixth birthday, according to a report.
The girl, Christina Abada, was reportedly rescued by the Iraqi Special Forces and was reunited with her parents on Friday morning, according to World Watch Monitor.
Christina's parents have been living at the Ashti refugee camp, near Erbil, for the last two years.
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"It is a very happy moment; everybody is dancing and clapping and singing," a local woman was quoted as saying. "She looks OK, quite healthy. I believe she must have been in the house of a family who took good care of her. She was even wearing gold earrings, so it must have been a wealthy family."
The girl, who was abducted in August 2104 after Islamic State captured Mosul and then Qaraqosh, appeared to be in shock after finding herself in new surroundings and people.
Her parents are from the Christian city of Qaraqosh in the Nineveh Plains. They initially decided not to flee along with other Christians, as the father is blind. However, one day, all the residents who remained in the area were rounded up in a bus for "medical check-ups." A jihadist came and took away Christina from her mother's lap while all the others were asked to take out and hand over all valuables to the jihadists.
All that Christina's parents wanted for the last three years was to get their daughter back and she was always on their minds. Christina also featured in a play Qaraqosh residents wrote and performed in Erbil as a cathartic approach to their trauma.
While Christina has returned home safely, thousands of other Yazidi, Christian and other minority girls and women have been subjected to horrific treatment by men from Islamic State, also known as IS, ISIS, ISIL or Daesh.
Nadia Murad, a human rights activist and sex slave survivor from a Yazidi village in Iraq, has spoken before the U.N. and several other humanitarian agencies about the horrors she and many others went through.
"We didn't feel valued as humans in their hands," she told STV News in February. "They enslaved more than 6,500 females, they took them to different places. They did what they want to the women and my fate was the same. I was one of the victims and they did everything to us."
The radicals would take any girl over 9 years old, abusing them and trying to force them to change their religion, she added. "We were subjected to crimes to their hands that nobody can mention what they did to us," she said, revealing that she was raped by 12 men.
In 2015, an 18-year-old Yazidi girl burned her entire face and body while she was being kept as a sex slave by ISIS in Iraq, looking to make herself "undesirable," so the militants would stop raping her.
