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Standing in the middle of a town destroyed by the brutal ISIS regime, Alex Crawford is visibly disturbed at the unimaginable horrors the Yazidi community in Iraq have faced over the last decade.
As a Sky News special correspondent, Alex is often travelling to hostile environments that many people will never visit in a bid to ensure stories don’t go untold. Over her 36-year career, she has witnessed extreme violence, terror and human suffering, but the regularity of these occurrences has not lessened the effect on her. That human reaction has never been something she’s tried to hide.
‘Obviously, I can’t completely break down, but I will always show emotion because I’m not a robot,’ she tells Metro.
‘The difference between me and a future AI replacement is that I can feel things. I should be horrified and emotional. The day that stops, I’ll start worrying about myself and won’t be as good at my job.’
The 63-year-old’s fearless journalism has so far been awarded five Royal Television Society awards, two Emmys, a Bafta, and an OBE, but she considers her latest documentary, 10 Years of Darkness: ISIS & The Yazidis, to be one of the most important.
It details the terror group’s systematic slaughter of the Yazidi people — a religious minority of Kurdish-speaking people — in Sinjar, Northern Iraq. Many men and boys were killed in the attack, while thousands of women and girls were captured to be made into slaves. They have endured violence, early marriage and repeated rape by ISIS fighters.
‘As a female journalist and a mother with daughters, I feel I shouldn’t be leaving this earth without using some of my work to highlight these massive, dangerous, injurious injustices to fellow females,’ Alex explains.
‘Their stories were pretty repulsive and shocking because, whoever you are, the idea that you would be enslaved by men or bought and sold between men is the peak nightmare for women. That hit me in the face right from the beginning.
‘This isn’t an exposé because it is not just a slight indiscretion, it is systemic abuse and rape on a massive scale.’
Having met survivors, Alex calls them ‘some of the most resilient, determined and courageous women I’ve ever met’.
‘I’m staggered at their resilience. I don’t know how someone puts up with that sort of level of abuse for 10 years,’ she continues.
More than 3500 Yazidis have been rescued from ISIS abduction in the last decade, but an estimated 2500 Yazidi women are still in captivity. Alex doesn’t think the crisis is getting the attention it deserves.
‘We’re just inundated with misery, trauma, wars and conflicts, and unfortunately, some get forgotten because there’s just too much for everyone to deal with. However, that shouldn’t be the case as far as international justice or global accountability is concerned,’ Alex stresses.
‘Our investigation showed that there’s still incredibly little accountability and therefore justice for what happened, despite about 80 different countries taking part in a coalition to crush ISIS.
‘If we don’t want the same things to happen again, we need to unite as an international community and make people pay for their actions.’
Kovan’s story
Ten years ago, Kovan – a Yazidi from northern Iraq – was abducted at age 14. She was cooking in her kitchen when she heard that ISIS was close, so she and her family grabbed what they could and left their home for a nearby mountain. Some fled in a car, while the younger and fitter people, including Kovan, tried to escape capture on foot.
‘They seized us in the middle of the road after we left,’ she tells Alex in the documentary. ‘We were terrified.’
They were taken to the Syrian border and kept in a school for nine days. Kovan was then forced onto a bus, separate from her family. ‘Men, women and girls went into separate buses. They took the girls to Mosul, and some of us were taken to Talafar,’ she recalls.
‘We were kept in a house guarded by ISIS militants. They kept us in the house to prevent us from escaping. Then, they would come to the house, choose girls and rape them.’
At an auction, Kovan was brought by someone considered to be a senior ISIS person and made to be his family’s slave.
‘I served them and did everything for them. They told me you are a ‘sabaya’ (slave), you are a servant. When ISIS gathered in the guestroom, he wanted me to serve them, to bring food and drinks. He always beat me and cursed me. He wanted me to appear in revealing clothes. He kept me and raped me. This went on for two years,’ she says.
Kovan endured a serious amount of abuse – both physical and mental – but speaks matter-of-factly about what she has endured. However, she gets really angry when talking about the women she encountered.
‘Their women were just like them. Their wives behaved just like their ISIS husbands. They always hit us and insulted us. They would prepare us, put makeup on us, for the men to violate us. They all knew that their men were raping us. I hated my life for the way they treated us. They were cruel to us. They sold us, raped us and wore us down mentally and emotionally. We hated ourselves and felt disgusted with ourselves.’
When she was rescued and taken away to a Yazidi safehouse, along with her two children, she had to make an extreme sacrifice to return to her family, giving up her children.
‘They are my children, but no one will welcome them because they are ISIS children and Muslim. This is the reality. What can I do? I go back to my family, and they’ll be back to theirs. This is very difficult, I don’t have any other option. This is the reality, we are forced to accept it,’ she says.
Over the years, Alex has documented countries in conflict, including Libya, Syria and Ukraine, and put herself in dangerous situations. She has been detained, abducted, interrogated, and faced live bullets, tear gas, and shelling.
‘I have a lot of fears for myself about what would happen if I were killed or injured,’ she admits.
‘People are fleeing dangerous zones, and we’re running towards them, so if you weren’t aware of what could go wrong, it would be odd. You have to be prepared.’
Alex’s line of work has forever changed her, in particular, she is ‘less tolerant and more aggressive’. This attitude has saved her from harm, she says, and provides a memory as evidence.
‘My crew and I were held at a checkpoint in Yemen by one militant group. They wouldn’t let us go forward as we didn’t have permissions, and they wouldn’t let us go back as we’d crossed the line into a different territory; we were only a few meters away. We were stuck there for hours on end,’ she recalls.
‘They kept on messing us around, and we were facing being stranded in a weapons-infested area overnight, which would have been very bad news.
‘Sometimes your options are taking a roll of the dice and hoping it ends with a couple of double sixes, or being up s**t creek without a paddle. I stormed over to the guys with big guns and started remonstrating with them and saying that they were treating guests of the country badly. This huge man said, “Are you threatening me?” but they knew they were being unreasonable, and we got to safety.
‘Being a woman can help in those circumstances. When you’re young, it helps because you’re a young woman, and then when you’re old like me, you can say, “Would you treat your mother like this?”’
History of ISIS horrors
The Islamic State first emerged in Iraq a few years after the US-led invasion, but it was only after the decline of al-Qaeda and the beginning of the Syrian Civil War that it became a major force.
After killing hundreds in a campaign of violence mostly contained within Iraq throughout the early 2010s, a shooting at the Jewish Museum of Belgium in May 2014 signalled the arrival of ISIS terror in Europe.
By the end of that year, further incidents linked to the group took place in France, Australia, Canada and the US, as well as Iraq.
On November 13 2015, the world was stunned by a coordinated series of attacks in Paris that left 130 people dead, including 90 who were attending an Eagles of Death Metal concert at the Bataclan theatre.
The car attack outside Parliament, the Manchester Arena bombing, and the London Bridge attack were carried out by perpetrators linked to the Islamic State within a matter of months in 2017.
However, the group’s power began to decline by the end of the 2010s as a US-led coalition took it on in the Middle East.
Then-leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, was killed by US special forces in 2019, and the caliphate in Iraq soon collapsed.
Despite the loss of much of its territory, ISIS has not completely disappeared, with its fighters now operating in largely autonomous cells.
Alex, who lives in Istanbul with her husband, sports journalist Richard Edmondson, says it can feel like a ‘handbrake turn’ slipping between her dangerous job and home life.
‘The adrenaline and the hunger to report keep me going when I’m away, and so the tiredness hits me in the face when I get home. I collapse after surviving three or four weeks with barely anything to eat or sleep and never relaxing,’ she explains.
It’s not just the news reporter who goes through it, her family feel the fear too. ‘They worry a lot. Every time I go anywhere, my partner says, “Please be careful”. When I was trying to get into Gaza, my children cried a lot and said, “I don’t want you to die.”’
Alex has four children — Nat, Frankie, Maddie, and Florence, who are now all in their twenties. ‘They would write me notes saying, “Please come back”.’
As a result of her job, Alex’s family are acutely tuned into global issues. ‘The children have lived and breathed it their entire lives.
‘When Osama Bin Laden got Twitter, it was my then-eight-year-old that told me and I informed my news desk,’ she remembers.
‘They are very aware of what’s happening in the world, and I don’t know whether that’s unusual because I’ve not been in any other family.’
Despite the job’s obvious difficulties, Alex does not foresee stopping any time soon. What’s evident when interviewing her is that her passion for the story is only intensifying the further into her career that she gets.
‘Unfortunately for my family, and possibly Sky News, I can’t imagine a time when I’m not doing this,’ she says. ‘It is much more than a job to me.’
10 Years of Darkness: ISIS & The Yazidis airs May 2 9pm on Sky News
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