ISIS Used Mosul Church as Site to Rape and Imprison 200 Girls, Gov’t Official Says

By Samuel Smith , CP Reporter
Islamic State militants used one of northern Iraq’s largest Christian sites to imprison and abuse as many as 200 Yazidi girls and women as sex slaves, an Iraqi military official has said.
(Photo: Reuters/Jala)Yazidi women targeted by ISIS in this undated photo.

Fox News’ Holly McKay has reported that barbaric IS (also known as ISIS, ISIL or Daesh) militants had used the Syrian Orthodox Church of St. Ephraim in eastern Mosul to not only store documents from the different departments within the extremist organization but to also hold and abuse innocent Yazidi women and children.

McKay, who visited what was once one of the largest churches in Mosul, explained that even though the church had been liberated months ago by Iraqi-led coalition forces in their effort to retake Iraq’s second-largest city, there still remains the evidence of the Yazidi girls’ captivity inside the house of worship.

McKay wrote that she found pieces of pink and yellow underwear and flower headbands that once belonged to Yazidi girls lying on the floor of the church basement.

As it has been widely reported that IS militants took thousands of religious minority girls hostage and sold and traded them to each other as sex slaves, Iraqi officials told McKay that as many as 200 different Yazidi girls and children were housed in the Church of St. Ephraim at some point.

“We found documents where they questioned them about their age, whether married or single, virgin or not, period or not,” Iraqi Forces 1st Lt. Waseem Nenwaya told Fox News.

Although McKay reports the the Church of St. Ephraim was liberated months ago, that was not before IS turned the church into a “mosque of the mujahideen.” Mujahideen is the arabic word that is the plural version of jihadi.

IS conquered Mosul and areas in the Nineveh Plains in the summer of 2014 and maintained control of Mosul until the Iraqi-led coalition began its liberation efforts of Mosul last October. After pushing IS forces out of eastern Mosul, the U.S.-backed coalition began its efforts to push the terror group out of western Mosul in February.