A collection of brave individuals acting on behalf of a little-known non-profit is running daring operations to free Islamic State sex slaves, including literally cutting the chains binding a woman to a bed.
The Liberation of Christian and Yazidi Children in Iraq (CYCI) is a non-profit dedicated to freeing ISIS sex slaves. It’s comprised of two teams, one inside the caliphate, and one outside in Kurdistan.
The team inside the caliphate gathers information and handles the logistics of getting a girl safely away from the caliphate and into the hands of the second team on the ground in Kurdistan. Members of the team working inside the caliphate have to carry weapons, according to the head of corporations for CYCI.
Dawood Jajju, the head of teams in Iraq and the head of corporations for CYCI, explained the entire process to The Daily Caller News Foundation in an exclusive phone interview.
A woman gets access to a phone or the Internet when her captor gets accustomed to their presence, explained CYCI founder Steve Maman over the phone. “They [the captors] relax the conditions as they become part of the household … a lot of them had contacted their families … then the family gets in contact with us.”
They then relay key information that leads the teams in identifying their locations.
The team on the ground will plan a route and patrol the area. They’ll case the location like bank robbers, checking to see who lives in the house, who typically escorts the women, whether the owner is an ISIS operative, and figuring out what time people are in and out of the house. Once they’ve completed their intelligence assessment, the team goes in when nobody is home and liberates the slaves.
They’ll then hand off the women or children to the second team, who “will bring the family to welcome the woman or the child back,” according to Jajju.
A video made public in January by Fusion, an online media outlet, chronicles the liberation of a 16-year-old girl by CYCI. At the end of this video Dawood Jajju says, “when you save a life, you save the whole world.”
WATCH:
Jajju runs the CYCI ground team and members of the team are from Baghdad and Kurdistan. Maman was first put in contact with Jajju through Andrew White, the clergy member in charge of the Anglican church in Baghdad.
Maman founded the organization because he couldn’t sit idle through the genocide and horrors afflicting the Yazidi population. He has thus earned the moniker “the Jewish Schindler” for his exploits in freeing the Yazidis.
Maman told TheDCNF the operation started with the liberation of three families about a year ago. Since then, CYCI has liberated 140 individuals through its operations in Iraq.
In the very beginning, liberating one individual cost anywhere from $1,000 to $3,000. Now, it costs anywhere from $2,000 to $10,000. The expenses are incurred from retrieving the girls and taking them out of the caliphate. Along the way, everyone gets paid: the intel team, the extraction team and the checkpoints.
The organization has gained a lot of criticism from the public. Many accuse CYCI of funding ISIS. Maman and Jajju both made it clear they do not pay for the girls. They smuggle them out of the territory and pay the extraction team. Jajju explained “they [the team] cannot cooperate and put their life at risk for nothing.”
Maman said, as an organization,”We don’t have the ability to help everyone, so we are focusing our help on the ones who have the most suffering.”
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