She was finally safe in a refugee camp in Iraq, but in her head, she still heard the demons — ISIS militants coming to rape and torture her yet again.
So the Yazidi girl named Yasmin, only 17 at the time, did the unthinkable: She doused herself in gasoline and lit a match in a desperate attempt to make herself unattractive to touch.
“Their voice was in my ears … I could hear their voice, I was so scared,” Yasmin told the Associated Press, reliving the devastating ordeal for the first time.
Then she thought she heard a shell exploding nearby.
“I couldn’t take it anymore,” she said. “And this is what happened to me.”
Yasmin, who is now 18, is now living in Germany, where doctors are trying to heal her physical wounds and emotional scars.
The brave girl is one of 1,100 women — mainly of the Syrian minority Yazidi sect — who have escaped ISIS captivity and are in Germany for psychological treatment in a program run by German doctor Jan Ilhan Kizilhan.
All of the women have permission to remain in Germany for two years, but will likely be granted asylum if they ask for it.
Kizilhan found Yasmin in a refugee camp in northern Iraq last year.
“I said, of course I want to go there and be safe, and be the old Yasmin again,” Yasmin said, according to the Associated Press.
Yasmin was 16 when she and her sister were separated from their family and fled into the mountains to escape the jihadist extremists. She spent a grueling seven days in ISIS captivity in Iraq — a place she has no intention of ever going back to.
Men were murdered and women and children were taken, Yasmin recalled.
“In the view of the Islamic State ideology, these people are not human beings,” Kizilhan told the Associated Press. “We experienced that also in the Nazi regime in Germany, they did the same with the Jews.”
Yasmin, who wears loose clothing to protect her sensitive skin, now lives in a single-family home with her parents, sister and two brothers.
“It is very important to tell our stories because the world should know what happened to us, so that it doesn’t happen again,” she said.
Yasmin, who has between five and 15 surgeries ahead of her, has big dreams of going to school, improving her German, learning English and getting a job in computers.
“I want to be through the surgeries and be healthy again,” Yasmin said. “My family is here and I want to start a new life.”