There was no mistaking him, the man standing just a few feet away. Ashwaq Ta’lo could never forget the smell of his breath, his wiry beard, that distinctive gait. She had spent three months as his slave after all.
The man was one of the Islamic State commanders who kidnapped Ashwaq, her four sisters and five brothers back in the Yazidi homeland of Sinjar in northern Iraq that sweltering summer of 2014.
But there he was in front of her in 2018 on a street in rainy Stuttgart, Germany – the country which had offered her refuge. A country where she had come to feel safe.
Ashwaq was just 15 when Isil militants laid siege to the ancient region of Sinjar, displacing hundreds of thousands and committing…