The Story of the Turkmenian Woman Pilgrims Live Under the Grip of ISIS

a woman from the unnamed Turkmenistan Shiite community recounted the brutality of the ISIS group that controlled its territory. (BBC / Mahmut Hamsici)

The Shiite Turkmenistan community in Iraq is one of the ethnic groups targeted for the brutal persecution of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).
One woman, who asked not to be named, told the BBC's Turkish correspondent, Mahmut Hamsici about the dificulty of life in the hands of this militia.
"We lived in the al-Alam district of Tikrit before the ISIS militant group took control of our lives," she said.
she is a Turkmenian Shiite and her husband is a Sunni Arab. He is a priest and honorable person in the community and the mosque where he leads the prayers adjacent to their abode.

"We do not know who is Sunni and who is Shia before, no one discussed it and there is no hostility in our community," she added.
"We have a big house that is rented to young women from Turkmenistan who work as teachers, one of them has a baby," she continued.
The woman has two children, a boy and a girl. They study in the same school so that every day the two children go to school together.

Husband brought ISIS
When the ISIS group entered Tikrit in June 2014, they executed many Iraqi troops at Speicher Camp.
"Several soldiers who escaped the massacre began to arrive in our town, after crossing the Tigris River (which flows between al-Alam and the city center) and the ISIS group is chasing them," she recalled.
Among the people who fled there were those from Turkmenistan. Some of them took refuge in my home, when they realized that the woman was also Turkmenian.
The women's family then helped some of them to escape by dressing like a woman.

"My husband hid three soldiers in the mosque, they are Shia members from the city of Basra."
One day, the ISIS group arrived at three in the morning and later learned that the woman and her family had helped the Iraqi soldiers.
They found the hideout of the young soldiers from Basra and immediately killed him.
"They also took my husband, I have not heard from him since that," she said sadly.
"Then they came back, blew up our house and told us to leave."
After that, the woman went with her two children, the teachers, the baby from Turkmenistan, and my stepdaughter - my husband's daughter from another wife.
But later, the ISIS group intercepted and took them to a garage with other women from a territory they had already mastered.

Categories: Politic, Social