Yazidi women share horrific stories of their lives as ISIS' sex slaves.

ISIS’ crimes against the Yazidi people of Iraq are nothing short of horrific.

Thousands were slaughtered in the “forced conversion campaign”, which began in 2014 and more than 5,000 Yazidi women and children were abducted and sold into slavery in Syria.

The women were often sold to militants as wives and sexual slaves and were abused, raped and tortured.

Some escaped and some returned home carrying the unborn children of their captors.

In a new project called ‘Escaped’, Iraqi photographer Seivan Salim has collected a series of portraits of ten escaped Yazidi women and collected their stories.

Jihan, 20, was one of those who fled to the mountains for safety, but returned to her village only when a Muslim friend told her it was safe to do so.

He had lied to her and Jihan was taken with 14 other young women by truck to Raqqa in Syria.

“We were all young and pretty,” she writes. “They told us that we would be sold, some as slaves, some as brides for the fighters. It was hot, unbearably hot and it was 150 of us in a house without windows, without air.

“One afternoon about 20 men entered the house and started beating us. They shouted that we were their slaves, and we should only obey them, and do whatever we are told to do. They told us that they would punish us, but never kill us, as they preferred to torture us.”

She, along with two others, was sold to a man from Kazakstan, ordered to be his personal slave.

“He was terrible to us and in the first three days only fed us a biscuit or two,” she says.

“We also did not have permission to wash, which I thought was ok, as I was scared that otherwise he would want to sleep with me. I preferred to stay dirty.”

Eventually she was sold to another man, told her he wouldn’t bother her if she converted to Islam.

He allowed her to spend time with other Yazidi women and gave her a phone, which she eventually used to contact her brother who organised her escape with a smuggler.

Rooba, 28, was sold to a 40-year-old man from Saudi Arabia who asked her to marry him and  threatened her when she would not.

“He asked me to marry him, and when I refused he said that he would punish me with the objects I saw on the table: a knife, a gun, a rope, ” she says.

“I refused over and over again. I was sold again. They told me that I better commit suicide. They beat me. They beat my niece, who is only 3-years-old. I was then sold again, to a man, a single man, who wanted to marry me and who wanted to sleep with me: I refused with all my energies, and again I was beaten, and so was my little niece. He tried to rape me, and when he couldn’t he sold me again.”

Her third owner was no kinder and his wife despised her, taking it out on her niece:

“She beat her so much, you can still see the wounds today. They did not let me change her diapers for a week. We were only allowed to eat small portions of food: after all we were slaves and we should not expect to have more food. My niece cried her eyes out for she was starving to death.”

Eventually Rooba got hold of a phone and managed to make contact with her uncle who organised her escaped.

When she was captured 22-year-old Nasima was taken to a local school.

ISIS militants separated the men from the women and then took the men outside and massacred them.

“We heard the shooting. We thought they were shooting at animals and didn’t think they were killing our men,” she says.

She was then taken to another village where the children where separated from the women and the women were split between young and old.

Sheiks and emirs came to view the young women.

“They were buying us,” she recalls.

“I don’t know what happened to the older ones. I don’t know what happened to my mother.”

Shadi, 18, also recalls being taken to a school and separated from the men.

“A 13-year-old boy came back, crying and full of dust. He could not stop crying, and then he told us that the men have all been killed, but we could not believe him,’ she says.

The young women were moved around from weeks and Shadi covered herself in dirt so that the men would not find her attractive.

Eventually they arrived in Raqqa where the women were kept underground:

“It was so dark that I could not tell the day from the night. They wrote our names on papers around our necks, and sold us.”

She and another woman ended up in a villa in Aleppo with her nephew where there was an American man who did not speak Arabic.

“He told us that we were his servants. He told me that we must marry him to become Muslim. When he asked me to bathe and marry him I told him that I was pregnant and could not have sex, so he brought me to a doctor and when he found out that I lied he beat me, he tied my hands with a cable and raped me.”

She tried desperately to make contact with locals who were just trying to survive.

“We tried and tried, until somebody helped us. We escaped, but still we don’t know anything about my uncles, my cousins and my brothers.”

You can read the profiles of all ten women in full on The Daily Beast.