The terrorist who had selected the 15-year-old as his prize pressed a pistol to her head, promising to pull the trigger. But it was only when the man put a knife to her 19-year-old sister’s neck that she finally relented, taking her next step in a dark odyssey of abduction and abuse at the hands of the terrorist group.

The sisters were among several thousand girls and young women from the minority Yazidi religion who were seized by the ISIL in northern Iraq in early August.

The 15-year-old is also among a small number of kidnapping victims who have managed to escape, bringing with them stories of a coldly systemized industry of slavery.

Their accounts tell of girls and young women separated from their families, divvied up or traded among the terrorist’s men, ordered to convert to  what they call Islam-which does not have any relates to Islam- subjected to forced marriages and repeatedly raped.

At first, though, the 15-year-old felt differently. “I want my name used because when the ISIL reads it, it will be like a revenge for me,” she declared at the outset of her interview, though she soon demurred on the advice of a Yazidi advocate with her, only permitting the use of her initials, D. A. The militants, she said, were still holding most of her immediate family.