A Yazidi woman who was kidnapped by Islamic State militants as an 11-year-old has published a book of letters she wrote while in captivity, addressed to her missing brother. Amera, now 22 and living in Australia, last saw her brother Ali on 4 August 2014, when IS fighters separated males from females in their village of Solagh in northern Iraq.
Her book, 'For Ali, For Us All: Messages From Captivity', written under the pen name Amera Ali, contains notes and letters secretly written during her eight months of enslavement. She wrote on paper found in a classroom desk at a school in Tal Afar, where she was held with 70 other Yazidi women and children, and hid the letters under desks, in her socks, and in her mother's pockets.
“I wrote because I was scared, but also because I had hope. I believed that maybe, one day, someone would read my words and understand what ISIS did to us,” the book states. Her mother warned her of the danger, but Amera persisted. When an IS fighter found a letter, he burned it in front of her.
Amera was later separated from her family for four months when an IS member, a former neighbour, forced her to live in his house. She escaped on foot in April 2015, on her 12th birthday, reaching the Yazidi town of Sinui. After four years in Iraqi refugee camps, her family moved to Australia in 2019 and settled in Armidale, New South Wales.
Now studying law at university, Amera is campaigning for international action to find the more than 2,700 Yazidis still missing. She says the trauma of captivity remains, and she finds the debate in Australia over the return of IS families difficult, but her focus is on securing justice for those still unaccounted for.
