Tina Ramirez, founder and president of Hardwired Global (www.hardwiredglobal.org) tells the story of a Yazidi woman who was sold to an American jihadist for $40, eventually escaped and testified before Congress and the United Nations.

<p>Tina Ramirez, founder and president of Hardwired Global (www.hardwiredglobal.org) tells the story of a Yazidi woman who was sold to an American jihadist for $40, eventually escaped and testified before Congress and the United Nations.</p>

<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

Church State Council

Alan Reinach

Sexual Enslavement of Women by ISIS Exposed


Ah, sweet land of liberty! Our founding fathers not only pledged, but gave their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to obtain our God-given liberty. Now it's our turn. Liberty can only thrive if it's alive in the hearts of a freedom-loving people. I'm Dan Matthews, and I'm pleased to welcome you to Freedom's Ring.

Here's our host and constitutional lawyer and minister, Alan Reinoch. If you've been paying attention at all, you know that our national policy has increasingly focused on the plight of women who have been taken into, really into sex slavery to serve the interests of ISIS. But I'm not sure that you realize how that story came to be something that our policy makers at Congress would pay attention to. The plight of women and slavery is an old issue. Obviously this is a new wrinkle.

And so here to talk about bringing that story to Congress is my good friend Tina Ramirez, founder and president of Hardwired Global on the web at hardwiredglobal.org. Tina, welcome back to Freedom's Ring. Thank you for having me on, it's great to be with you. Well, I want you to tell our listeners about the young woman that you brought to meet with congressmen so they could learn about this problem firsthand. Well, it was really such an honor to bring Anne Zizzi, well known as Bob Zizzi, that's her student name, to protect her identity to the United States and have her testify in Congress and then at the UN, actually, because she wasn't just...

She was 1 of about 5, 000 girls that were kidnapped by ISIS and sexually enslaved, But her captor was an American, actually, who had converted to Islam and gone to join ISIS. And so he came in the militant and enslaved her. He bought her for $40. And so when we brought her here, part of bringing her to the United States was to highlight the fact that, look, you've got over 180 Americans as of last year that had gone to be foreign fighters with ISIS. The problem is really coming up to roots for us.

And in this globalized world, we really can't ignore what's happening in Iraq and Syria. And obviously, the attacks in Paris last week kind of brought that home to us, but Bazi's story really helped us see that, look, if Americans have been overdoing it, Maybe we'll begin to take more notice at something you've done to help stop Isis before they Continue to destroy these in girls lives and led to so many religious communities over in Iraq and Syria They're just being terrorized by them right now You mentioned that this woman is Yazidi, and I'm sure I have a dim understanding of what that means, and many of our listeners maybe have never even heard of Yazidi. Can you explain what that is? Sure. The Yazidis are a religious community in northern Iraq, they also exist in Iran, and they are descendants of ancient Zoroastrians.

So they have a faith that's mixed with a little bit of Zoroastrianism and has kind of picked up some of the aspects of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam over the years. But essentially it's a religion of, they're pacifists, so they obviously will fight back from the start, but they have a belief in actually 1 god, and they believe that 1 of the angels that they honor in Ravir is an angel that had a lot of wisdom. The Muslims consider that angel, the angel's name is Shaytan, so they consider, the Muslims consider Satan and then condemn them as heretic devil worshippers. So they've been really persecuted over the years by the Muslim community in that region because they're considered devil worshippers. But they're peaceful people from this part that believe in an ancient religion, that There's only about a million of them, about...

But much of it, and when that happened, they were left in Iraq. But they're a small people group that, essentially, when ISIS came in, they decided that, you know, what a great way to recruit more militants by offering them free sex with these slave girls. They have used the Yazidi community as a tool for recruiting more young men to come and fight with them, which is really sad. They want such a horrific genocide on this religious community in addition to what they're doing against the Christians and others in Iraq. And the fugitive really has gotten the breath of the lowest of vials in Iraq right now.

And they've been subjected really to a kind of ethnic cleansing, haven't they? Yeah, absolutely. And what Bazi shared from her story is that when they... So the ISIS came into the Sinjar mountain area, which is where the Yusufids live in Iraq, around August 2nd or 3rd of last year, and attacked village by village by village. Many of them were able to flee the mountain.

Many of them were killed, but a number were able to escape or flee the mountain. But in her village, a village called Cocho, when ISIS completely surrounded the village, they were cut off completely. And the local Arab Muslims in the village convinced the Yusufi community that, look, if you just give up your weapons, us, we'll call the ISIS that you're friendly, that you don't mean any harm, and we'll try to protect you. They did. They believed it.

And then the locals allowed ISIS in and then joined ISIS. And what they did is they brought everybody into the main school building in the village, and then separated the men from the women and children. Took all the men, ages like 14 to 40, outside and just shot and killed them. And then the young girls, they began to send into different parts of northern Iraq and eventually into Syria where they sold them into slavery, sexual slavery. And just, I mean, the things that Bobby described that they did to these poor people was just so, you hear the stories about how they dehumanized them, the point that they were starving the women and children to really just to destroy their humanity and destroy their will and to break them down emotionally.

And so they finally would start feeding them, but they fed them rice with broken pieces of glass in it and the people were so starved that they ate it and it was harming their internal organs. So you can just imagine the horror and then going and just every night raping and raping and raping the girls and saying that they're doing it in the name of religion and praying before and after every time they would do it. And it just reminds you of the Holocaust. It reminds you of, I mean, the mass graves. Just last Thursday, the Kurds were able to regain the territory that ISIS had taken in Sinjar, and they found several mass graves that had bodies.

And sadly, Badi, 1 of the 5, 000 girls that had been sexually assaulted in this way and enslaved, Badi's mother was found in 1 of those graves, and so she was really sad. Just to be clear, the women who were sold into sex slavery, they were not treated like we would think a wife would be treated. They were just raped and subjected to violence. I remember the fifth time she escaped, but prior to that, on the fourth time she escaped, her captor took her young nephew and sent him away. She didn't know where he was sent, but most likely to a jihadist training camp, because when he came back, he was memorizing the Quran and he was praying 5 times a day and he was just so scared that if he didn't pray, something would happen.

And she helped him and another girl that were in the same place with her. 8, finally, that was the fifth time. And when they finally got safety in the Kirsh area, even to this day, he is afraid to not pray. He knows he's a Yiddity. He knows he's Muslim.

But that was just whatever happened to them. They terrorized the Sanboy. I mean, genocide is when you essentially walk trainable without a community, either by physically killing them or by cutting off any ability for them to survive in the community. So they were enslaving these girls and impregnating them, really just forcing, trying to destroy their population of these cities. And any of the men, they killed immediately.

So for these young girls, even to run now, for their community to continue in Iraq is gonna be extremely difficult. How did you meet this woman and how did you come to bring her to testify before Congress? So Hardwire, the organization that I run, is doing programming in Iraq to train local leaders to defend religious freedom. And we have actually, I've been involved in Iraq for many years, but I started hard water a few years ago. We just got a grant to start this programming, which is really long overdue.

If we had been training people to defend religious freedom with 1 another 10 years ago when we first went into Iraq, the communities that turned on 1 another and turned Yezidis into ISIS maybe wouldn't have. But because we never invested in them with this freedom and teaching people to defend 1 another regardless of their religion, you didn't have any local leaders that were willing to do that beyond defending themselves. And so that's what we're trying to change in Iraq right now. And 1 of the partners that we work with is a Yezidi man who had been involved in helping rescue many of the girls from his community that were enslaved by ISIS. So we wanted to bring attention to Congress to the persecution of the civil community and so I brought my local partner and this young girl, Bobbie, to the United States to draw attention and to help do something to really help them practically.

And then we can go and do the training, but they have a real immediate need that there are still 3, 000 girls enslaved by ISIS that need to get out and come home. And so we started here to introduce legislation at the same time that would call for the prosecution and investigation of ISIS. And actually what was great is that the U.S. Attorney General's Office and the FBI started the formal investigation of the American that held her while she was here. So that was a great success and we're really thankful to the FBI and the Attorney General's Office that did that, but they also, Congressman Trent Frank in the House and Senator Ron Johnson in the Senate introduced legislation that we helped them with that will get passed, get the president to actually take action at the UN Security Council.

The United States, as you know, is a member of the UN Security Council and has a vote there. So we can introduce a resolution at the UN Security Council that would create sanctions so That the members fighting with Isis, whether they're Americans or anyone else, wouldn't be able to continue to travel back and forth into Syria, which they're still doing, that their bank accounts, if we've identified them, would be frozen, and to implement other sanctions so that we can really stop them from continuing this barbarism that they're carrying out against the Yazidis, the Christians, and so many others in our region. So, it sounds like you're still trying to get this legislation passed. Right. So the Senate resolution, Senate Resolution 310, and the Senate actually had it passed out of the Foreign Relations Committee, which is a great move.

Senator Marco Rubio was on board with that legislation as well. And we are just waiting for it to come to the Senate floor for a vote. The more members we have on that, the stronger it will be. And then in the House, we are waiting on Chairman Ed Royce of the House Bribaries Committee and then the Judiciary Committee to release it from their committees so that it can get to the floor for a vote. So if your listeners are willing to call their member of Congress and ask them to get on House Resolution 447 to help us prosecute ISIS, stop them from carrying out this barbarism against the Yazidi girls, that would be great.

And then there's other legislation in Congress as well. There's the resolution 75, to declare that what's happening is genocide against the Christians, Yazidis, and many others. And we've heard that the president is likely to declare it genocide, but we've also heard that he may only declare genocide against the Yazidis and not against the Christians, which is unfortunate because really they're all undergoing ethnic cleansing and the forced removal of their communities from Iraq. We're out of time. Our guest today, Tina Ramirez, president of Hardwired Global.

Tina, I'm sure there's more information about this on your website at hardwiredglobal.org. And by all means, listeners, call your members of Congress, call your senators. What are the bill numbers again? Because that's all you really need is to tell them to support these bills. Yeah, and they can go on our website, hardwiredglobal.org and on the first page there's a link to the information on how to get their coverage done.

This has been Freedom's Ring. I'm your host, Alan Reinach. Until next week, Let freedom ring. You

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Sexual Enslavement of Women by ISIS Exposed

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