How a network of amateur sleuths helps rescue women kidnapped by Islamic State group

The investigator's eyes dart between the two photographs. In one, a young girl, maybe 10, is wearing a colorful shirt, her hair loose. In the other, a woman, her face weathered to an indeterminate age and framed by a black hijab, stares into the camera.

The first picture is among hundreds of images of young girls sent in by families desperate to find loved ones who were kidnapped years ago, when militants from the Islamic State group first roared to power in Iraq and Syria. The pictures of older women come in from a variety of sources.

The woman examining the photographs has become skilled at finding the telling detail that might help confirm an identity -- and lead to someone's freedom. But she is not a professional investigator. Her name is Pari Ibrahim, and by day she is the executive director of a nonprofit in suburban Maryland.

At night, by the glow of a laptop screen, she scours the photos, hoping to locate women taken captive as long as a decade ago.

"Sometimes, late at night, I'm working to see if this girl is someone who can be identified," said Ibrahim, as she compared the two photographs, searching the faces for any hint -- the bow of the lips, perhaps, or a telltale mole -- that she might be looking at the same person.

"Ten years brings a lot of change into someone's face and appearance," she said. "It's not easy."

The missing people are all members of a religious minority, the Yazidi, who were a particular focus of the brutal campaign of terror that the Islamic State group, also known as ISIS, launched in 2014. In the years that followed, according to a United Nations commission, the militants murdered, enslaved, raped and tortured at will. About 3,100 Yazidis were killed and 6,800 kidnapped in August 2014 alone, one study estimates.

The Rescuers

Now, more than half a decade since the Islamic State group's self-proclaimed caliphate in Syria and Iraq fell, nearly 2,600 Yazidis remain unaccounted for, according to Ibrahim's nonprofit, the Free Yezidi Foundation; in 2022, the United Nations Refugee Agency put the number at about 3,000. The foundation, which uses an alternative spelling for the ethnoreligious group, provides support services to members of the Yazidi diaspora.

Many are presumed dead, but Ibrahim is hopeful that as many as 1,000 are still in captivity, held by their kidnappers or transferred to fighters' extended families throughout the Middle East.

Although the United Nations has called treatment of the Yazidis genocide, the U.N. agency mandated to collect evidence of the Islamic State group's atrocities ceased operating last year. There is no official entity dedicated to finding the women -- and their children.

That task has been taken up by a sprawling network of activists, survivors, family members, informants and amateur detectives such as Ibrahim, a Yazidi whose family left Iraq in the early 1990s. The New York Times interviewed people based in Maryland, Germany, Australia, Iraq and Syria.

They described a modern-day Underground Railroad, on which journeys often begin with snippets of information and photographs shared via messaging apps. Sometimes that information is conveyed to families of the missing, some of whom hire informants and human smugglers to reunite them with their loved ones. Other times it is shared with local authorities.

One member of the unofficial network, Abduallah Abbas Khalaf, helped free his niece from the Islamic State group in 2014 using connections he made working as a beekeeper and honey vendor in Aleppo, Syria. Khalaf, who is Yazidi and is based in Iraq, says he went on to help free other captives through a variety of methods, including impersonating militants online.

"We used to log into ISIS telegram channels and we used to pretend that we were ISIS members," he said. To appear more convincing, he said, he would sometimes inquire about weapons and equipment.

"They would welcome us," Khalaf said, "and after a period of time, they would post pictures of girls or boys for selling." As he pretended to be negotiating the price, he said, he would really be trying to coax out the whereabouts of the captives.

Khalaf shared screenshots from what appeared to be the Islamic State group's messaging channels on which women and children were being trafficked. The images showed forum users haggling over sex slaves. The Times was not able to independently verify the source of the images because many of the channels have since been made private or deleted.

At the height of the Islamic State group's reign in the portions of Syria and Iraq that it conquered, the enslavement and sale of women was conducted openly. Later, it became more discreet, experts said. Women and girls have been bought and sold online, and then transferred across national borders quietly, making the work of those who would rescue them all the more difficult.

"While the public Yazidi slave markets of the Islamic State caliphate period no longer exist," said Devorah Margolin, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, "some women remain enslaved by Islamic State affiliates and continued to be sold by supporters of the group even after the fall of its caliphate."

According to investigators, experts and news reports, captives have been found in homes connected to Islamic State members as far away as Turkey and the Gaza Strip. Other Yazidis have ended up alongside their captors in overcrowded and dangerous desert camps.

About 3,600 Yazidis have managed to get back to their families, according to Nadia's Initiative, another nonprofit group that works with the Yazidi.

One of them, Sherine Hakrash, said she had been held captive in Syria with her two daughters until she was sold to a Saudi man. Speaking haltingly and at times in tears by telephone from her new home in Australia, Hakrash said it was too painful to talk about what the girls looked like when she last saw them, in 2018.

"I don't know anything about them," she said. "If they are alive. If they need me. How their situation is."

The upheavals in the Middle East over the past year and a half have further complicated efforts to locate and rescue missing people. In Iraq, for example, the government recently directed a team of international experts investigating Islamic State group crimes to wind down their work.

In Syria, the ouster of President Bashar Assad has led both to hope and fear among Yazidis. They want to take the opportunity to search for the missing, but they worry that instability may pave the way for a resurgence of the Islamic State group.

The Detention Camp

As their caliphate fell in 2019, Islamic State fighters fled across the region, some taking their captives with them. In many cases, women were forced to marry their kidnappers, integrating them into expansive clans that could then traffic them around the world.

In December in Germany, federal prosecutors accused two people they said were Iraqi members of the Islamic State group of sexually abusing two young Yazidi girls they kept as slaves. The girls had been held captive by the couple when they were 5 and 12. In Gaza, a woman kidnapped by the Islamic State group at age 11 and, U.S. officials say, later sold and forced to marry a Hamas fighter, was rescued in October after her captor died.

Captivity for some Yazidis grew still worse after their captors were themselves detained.

Some ended up in al-Hol, a sprawling nightmare of a detention camp in the desert of eastern Syria. Captive Yazidi women there are forced to live alongside Islamic State members and their families. The camp, in which thousands of people are held, is dangerous -- murders are common, and there have been reports of beheadings.

For the network of rescuers, al-Hol presents a special challenge. Captives there are reluctant to identify themselves as Yazidis for fear that the Islamic State members in their midst, some of whom have organized themselves into a religious police force, will target them. Others may have been taken captive when they were too young to know their heritage.

"The way they were enslaved outside al-Hol camp, they are enslaved inside -- the torture, everything," said the camp's director, Jihan Hanan, who has worked with Yazidi investigators to help extricate captives in the camp.

One member of the informal rescue network, Barjas Khidhir Sabri, is a Yazidi from Sinjar province in Iraq who currently lives in an Iraqi camp for internally displaced people. It is about 100 miles from al-Hol.

From his tent, using little more than his wits and a smartphone, Sabri has developed his own web of informants, which include men he says are Islamic State members living at al-Hol.

"I don't trust them and they don't trust me," Sabri said of the Islamic State members. "I have to work with them. I have no regrets because any possible way we can save women and girls, it is worthwhile."

Ibrahim said the Free Yezidi Foundation did not deal with Islamic State members under any circumstances. But for many families, desperation overshadows the disgust of dealing with -- and even paying -- those who belong to the terrorist group, Sabri said.

When a woman in the camp is identified as a possible Yazidi captive, Hanan works with security guards to arrange a discreet interview.

Hanan said she had seen seven Yazidi girls and women liberated from al-Hol in at least the past two years.

But it is not always simple.

Some Yazidi women who have given birth to their captors' babies fear their children may not be accepted by the Yazidi community. Some who have been raped fear returning home only to be shunned. Still others who were captured as young children know nothing but their captors' families and may not even realize that they are Yazidi.

"We have to make sure the woman is able to make a choice in a safe space," said Ibrahim.

Marwa Nawaf Abas embraced the opportunity for freedom.

"I was held captive as a sex slave for three months of torture and sold on to several ISIS terrorists," Abas, who was 21 when she was rescued, said in an interview.

After escaping from her captors in Raqqa, Syria, in 2014, Abas was offered temporary protection by a local family. She contacted her uncle, and her family paid smugglers to take her from the Islamic State group-controlled area to a Kurdish-controlled one.

Abas moved to Germany and works at a hair-transplant center.

"I am very happy now in Germany," she said.