Yazidi girls are having secret abortions and operations to repair virginity

Traumatised after months of rape and torture at the hands of ISIS militants, some of victims have returned after falling pregnant by their captors and further at risk at being ostracised by their community, which frowns upon pre-marital sex.

Now, some Kurdish doctors are allegedly performing illegal abortions and secret surgeries to 'reverse loss of virginity' on the victims, some of whom are as young as eight, the Sunday Times reports. 

The young girls, some barely teenagers, are some of around 40,000 people kidnapped at gunpoint when Islamic State fighters attacked Yazidi villages last summer. 

The women who have escaped now face being shunned by their strict religious communities, and many are erase to hide the physical evidence of their time in captivity, Hala Jaber writes in the Sunday Times.

Some Yazidi girls are secretly undergoing abortions, banned in Kurdistan even in cases of rape, and seeking hymen surgery to 'reverse the loss of virginity'.

A recent study by Human Rights watch has found that ISIS fighters have been kidnapping women and children as young as eight, forcing them to marry and convert to Islam and raping them repeatedly.

Around 40,000 people were kidnapped at gunpoint when Islamic State fighters attacked Yazidi villages last summer.

Hundreds have been able to return, either by fleeing or being set free by ISIS, and many young women who has been held as sex slaves.  

Their terrifying campaign of systematic rape was tantamount to war crimes - and possibly crimes against humanity, the report adds.

Human Rights Watch has collected the accounts of 20 women and girls who escaped from ISIS, which they say shows a system of organised rape and sexual assault, sexual slavery and forced marriage – acts that constitute war crimes.

Now they are urging that survivors get the medical and psychological treatment that they need to cope with the unimaginable trauma they suffered.

A 31-year-old Yazidi woman named Rashida told the charity she was told by her brother to commit suicide if she was unable to escape the ISIS fighters who had captured her.

‘Later that day they made a lottery of our names and started to choose women by drawing out the names', the 31-year-old said.

‘The man who selected me, Abu Ghufran, forced me to bathe but while I was in the bathroom I tried to kill myself.

‘I had found some poison in the house, and took it with me to the bathroom. I knew it was toxic because of its smell.

‘I distributed it to the rest of the girls and we each mixed some with water in the bathroom and drank it. None of us died but we all got sick.’

(dailymail.co.uk)