They Escaped Islamic State. But Their Horror Hasn't Ended.

“Let them kill us... It’s better than the life we’re leaving behind.”
Minya Mesmer (R) is seen with her daughter at a military building in Misrata, Libya, November 6, 2016.

SIRTE, Libya, Dec 14 (Reuters) - One mild morning in October, when the roar of fighter jets over Sirte had died down and the crackle of gunfire had paused, Minya Mesmer decided to break free.





Their captors were too distracted to stop them. Islamic State was four months into a vicious fight against pro-government Libyan forces, a war that had claimed hundreds of lives as it moved from neighborhood to neighborhood and door to door. The Islamist group was growing tired.



Mesmer and the girls did not die. But their life would take a new, cruel, turn. The Libyan brigades they surrendered to that day have imprisoned them. After more than a year as Islamic Stateslaves, the women are accused of being part of the group.

African migrants fleeing their countries to seek freedom, peace or opportunity in Europe - some 175,000 this year alone - embark on a path of tribulation and likely death. Thousands perish crossing the Sahara Desert. Even more drown in the Mediterranean Sea after paying rich sums to smugglers who pack them into the bellies of dilapidated boats.














The couple set up a small convenience store in their neighborhood. Their oldest daughters thrived at school. But after local police jailed Dawit, twice, for speaking his mind at union meetings, they decided to leave the country.









The truck, crammed with 72 migrants in all, traveled four hours along the highway towards the capital before Islamic State fighters stopped it. The fighters separated the women and children and then took them to a compound in Harawa, a small town in central Libya.


The interior of a mosque where Eritrean migrants hid after escaping from Islamic State captors in Sirte, Libya, November 11,



In February, a middle-aged Saudi fighter called Abubeker bought Mesmer and her daughter. AnIslamic State commander had promised Mesmer that her daughter would not be sold to a different owner. But Abubeker ignored that.










A former hostage of the Islamic State reacts at a military building in Misrata, Libya, November 6, 2016.



The Misratan response was swift. The city’s war-hardened youth joined brigades in droves. Backed by a U.N.-installed government in Tripoli, the brigades pooled their weapons - old Russian rifles, T-55 tanks, and other arms from Muammar Gaddafi’s tenure - and took the fight to IslamicState.

But the Misratans’ zeal was matched by the tenacity of the hardline group’s skilled snipers and suicide bombers. The death toll climbed on both sides.

Then, in August, American fighter jets began bombing Sirte.

Before the airstrikes, the captive women lived in separate buildings in groups of three or four. But after civilians abandoned the city and the bombings became more frequent, Islamic State fighters rounded up the slaves and placed them in a medafa or guesthouse. They placed their wives in the same building so they could keep watch over the slaves.

The captive women said the fighters’ wives wore suicide belts and threatened to detonate the explosives. The wives taunted and threatened the captives. Airstrikes punctured each day.

When a slave’s owner died in the fighting, another fighter would take his place within a week. Some of the women said they were resold up to four times over the summer. The guesthouse became, in essence, a brothel.

“It felt like we were in two wars - one with the bombs and the incoming fire and the other with the Daesh men and their abuse,” Tigsti Fisahaye, a 24-year-old captive said. “The men expected us to die with them.”

Eventually, the fighters separated the two classes of women. They took the slaves to a building in a residential neighborhood called Number 3, one of the last Islamic State holdouts in Sirte. Each fighter would visit the building at night and take his slave with him. He would then rape her in buildings along the frontline and return her in the morning.

U.S. airstrikes have reduced some neighbourhoods in Sirte, Libya to rubble.


By August, Islamic State’s caliphate had shrunk to a few city blocks. Resources dwindled and the women grew hungry. Their captors fed the women macaroni twice a day but the portions kept getting smaller. Some days, the women searched for food among the collapsed buildings. These scavenging tours doubled as reconnaissance missions.

With only a few blocks left under their control, the Islamic State fighters retrenched. They dug tunnels to hide from airstrikes. They moved the captives to a building closer to the shoreline. Because the fighter jets struck every moving vehicle, the women had to walk to their new prison. Mesmer tried to walk, too, in part to test her strength, but her feet could not carry her. She sent her daughter back to fetch the wheelchair she had used since February.

Her daughter had barely turned the corner when a fighter jet decimated the building the women had called home for a month. Three Islamic State snipers, who had been posted inside the building and had helped Mesmer’s daughter carry the wheelchair outside, died in the blast.

Just over a month later, on the first Wednesday morning of October, Mesmer decided to escape again.

“In the end, I thought it was better to die trying to escape than to die crushed under the weight of a collapsed building,” she said.

Mesmer, her daughter, and the 16-year-old captive wore jeans and t-shirts under their long black abayas. They walked the few blocks held by Islamic State and then past the frontline, hugging walls as they could. Mesmer, still in pain from her broken legs, limped along. When they heard incoming gunfire, the women hid in a building next to an abandoned mosque.

At 10 a.m., they heard the shouts of fighters from one of the Misratan brigades urging them to emerge from their hideout.

In a grainy video shot by the brigade’s fighters, one man can be heard screaming, “You are safe! I swear to Allah you are safe!”

In the video, the 16-year-old captive walks out first, hands in the air, followed a few minutes later, by Mesmer and her daughter. As the women approached, the fighters told them to stop and strip down to prove they were not wearing suicide belts. The instructions were lost on the women who continued to walk toward the fighters.

For a frightening moment, Mesmer was not sure whether they were safe or about to be shot - until she saw one of the soldiers do something forbidden by Islamic State. He dragged on a cigarette.

A week later, eight more women jumped through a kitchen window and walked to their freedom. They had been locked up after Mesmer and the two girls escaped but decided to bolt whenIslamic State fighters told them they were about to be moved again.

They followed the same path Mesmer had taken. A different brigade took them in.

“At first they were frightened, but after they realized they were safe, they took off their hijabs and said ‘We are free again,’” said Mustafa Shaibani, the 30-year-old commander of the Misratan brigade that received the captives.

The women asked for food and water. Shaibani’s brigade brought them brioche, water and minced-meat sandwiches.

By the end of October, 14 more women, including two Ethiopians and three Nigerians hadescaped. Seven Filipino medical workers followed.

There are now nearly 70 women in the military airbase where the Misrata brigades keep their female prisoners. The Eritrean refugees say they share rooms with Islamic State wives and female fighters who had helped sell them into sexual slavery while they were captives of the extremist group. Fights have erupted.

“These women used to sell us and exchange us and now that they’re here ... they call us dirty, they call us whores,” said Mesmer.

The brigades have not yet identified how many of the women were captives of Islamic State and how many came to Sirte on their own. What devastates the women is that their new captors see little distinction between them and Islamic State sympathizers.

“They call us Daesh. We are not Daesh,” the 42-year-old captive said. “We were captives. We suffered in the hands of Daesh. We want our freedom, but we haven’t found our freedom.”

As Mesmer and her 14-year-old daughter began their captivity with the Misratans, Reuters determined what became of her younger children.

The three children, aged 13, 10 and 8, had survived the crossing of the Mediterranean. They were in a small town in Germany, Giessen, a 50-minute drive north of Frankfurt. Her husband was living in the United Kingdom. The children had been unable to reunite with their father because he is an undocumented immigrant.

But they were safe, living with a caretaker assigned by the German government. In Misrata last month, a reporter told Mesmer the news and showed her recent pictures of the three.

For a moment, Mesmer was silent. Then she buried her head in her lap and burst into tears.

“My children,” she murmured between sobs. “I didn’t know if they were still alive. I didn’t know if they’d drowned at sea... I thank my God.”

(Additional reporting by Ahmed Elumami in Misrata; Edited by Simon Robinson and Alessandra Galloni)