In August 2014, Farida, like any ordinary teenage girl, was enjoying the summer holidays before her last year at school. But Farida lived in the mountains of northern Iraq - and what happened next was unimaginable. Her village was an ISIS target. ISIS jihadists murdered the men and boys, including her father and brother, before taking Farida and the other women prisoner. This is the story of what happened to Farida after she was captured: the beatings, the rapes, the markets where ISIS sold women like cattle, and Farida's realisation that the more resistant she became, the harder it was for her captors to continue their atrocities against her. So
she struggled, she bit, she kicked, she accused her captors of going against their religion, until, one day, the door to her room was left unlocked.
She took her chance and, with five younger girls in her charge, fled into the Syrian desert. Farida showed incredible courage in the face of the unthinkable, and now with
The Girl Who Beat ISIS she
bravely relives her story to bear witness. Searing and immediate, this is the first memoir by a young woman that shows first-hand what life is like for innocents caught up in the maelstrom of day-to-day life with ISIS.
Farida Abbas was a normal Yazidi girl living in the mountains of northern Iraq in 2014. In this memoir, she describes how ISIS murdered all the men and boys in her village, and kidnapped all the women, who were beaten, raped and sold like cattle. But one day, she and 5 other women escaped across the Syrian desert.