Syrian Kurdish hostages escape from IS

KOBANI, Syrian Kurdistan (K24) – Eighteen Kurdish hostages managed to flee from Islamic State (IS) in northern Syria on Feb. 6 after coalition aircraft bombed the city of al-Bab, northeast of Aleppo.

On Wednesday, the freed prisoners arrived in the Kurdish town of Kobani, and many of them told K24 about the constant torture they endured while detained for over six months.
Sharif Muslim, a 56-year-old explained to K24, “The terrorists kidnaped me with 14 members of my family from a village of south of Kobani on Aug. 24, under the pretext that Kurds are infidels and should [forcibly] be taught Islam.”

“They [IS] pretend to be tolerant, but the reality is the opposite; they tortured my cousins and me severely when anyone of us uttered a single word of Kurdish,” Muslim said.
“After the terrorists had kidnaped us, we were blindfolded and taken to the city of Manbij [an IS-held city northwest of Aleppo] where we stayed for a month, and then were transferred to al-Bab,” Muslim added, pointing out that he spent three months in solitary confinement.
Muslim added that he and his family members were tortured nearly every day.

“Sometimes a plastic bag was placed over my face until I nearly suffocated. We were electrocuted, beaten with plastic pipes, and whipped with cables,” Muslim said, noting that there were a lot of mock executions by IS intended to terrify prisoners, and he was taken twice for execution but returned to his confinement.

“They put a gun to my head and said, ‘We are going to kill you now,’ and then shoot next to me. Sometimes they made us watch real executions in Manbij,” Muslim said.

Reporting by Hisham Arafat
Editing by Benjamin Kweskin

(Redwan Bezar conducted the interview in Kobani)