‘We were told we were jihadists’: Yazidi teen details daring escape from ISIS training camp
(FOX)- A Yazidi boy who escaped an ISIS training camp and made a daring trek to safety across the desert of northern Iraq told FoxNews.com in an exclusive interview about his hellish, nine-month ordeal under the black-clad terrorist army’s brutal grip.
Now safe in a Kurdish-run refugee camp, Ahmed Amin Koro, 15, fears he will never again see his father again. He wonders how the tight-knit religious minority can recover from the scars inflicted by ISIS in the nearly two years since it stormed Mount Sinjar, the ancestral home of 150,000 Yazidi.
“For a moment, if I feel happy, my neighbors are not,” Ahmed told FoxNews.com in a Skype interview arranged by Kurdish authorities. “We cannot be happy. “We think of others who are with ISIS. It is a difficult life.”
Ahmed was just 13 when ISIS laid siege to Mount Sinjar in early August of 2014. For days, the Yazidi, an ancient religious minority wrongly regarded by many in the region as devil worshippers, remained trapped in the towns that dot the mountainside, such as Tel Qasab, Tel Banat, Qahtania and Mojamaa Al Jazeera, as the world watched a humanitarian crisis unfold. Iraqi military choppers airlifted some to safety, while others formed convoys to flee down the only road leading off the mountain.
Ahmed’s father had desperately hoisted him and his little brother into a relative’s vehicle and stayed behind, but moments later, ISIS fighters manning a checkpoint on the road stopped the car.
”At first they told us, ‘We have no problem with you, you are all our brothers and our sisters,’” the soft-spoken boy told FoxNews.com from the Kurdish city of Duhok. “At first they told us they wouldn’t hurt us.”
While Ahmed and the other children were being whisked 50 miles east to the ISIS-controlled town of Tal Afar, the Islamist army was moving up the mountain with savage precision, destroying entire villages and burying countless men and women alive in a horrific scene that galvanized international disgust. Witnesses would later give grimly similar accounts of military-age men being summarily executed while other adults were told to convert to Islam or die.