Baghdad: Iraqi forces in Mosul have freed an 11-year-old Yazidi girl who was kidnapped and sold by the IS group in 2014, the federal police said on Friday.
The girl was taken by the fighters from the village of Kosho, south of the Yazidi hub of Sinjar in northern Iraq, together with her mother and sisters.
She was freed during an operation by the security forces on Thursday in the west Mosul neighbourhood of Tanek, federal police chief Lieutenant General Raed Shakir Jawdat said in a statement.
The elite Counter-Terrorism Service has been operating in the area and secured more than half of the neighbourhood on Thursday.
“They who kidnap these children are monsters,” Major General Jaafar al Baatat, Jawdat’s top aide, said in a statement which was released with a video showing the girl at a police base south of Mosul.
Vian Dakhil, a prominent Yazidi lawmaker who helped bring her minority’s plight to the world’s attention when IS fighters wept through the region in 2014, said the girl’s release had been carefully planned.
“When Daesh (IS) took her village on August 15, 2014, she was eight years old and she was kidnapped with her mother and her sisters,” she said. “She was initially taken to Tal Afar and was sold on to Mosul.”
Most of the several hundred thousand members of the minority live in northern Iraq, mainly around Sinjar, a large town which anti-IS forces have now retaken but was extensively destroyed.
The biggest land battle in Iraq since the 2003 invasion, the battle to free Mosul of IS is now in its seventh month. — AFP
Oman Observer is now on the WhatsApp channel. Click here
