FRONTLINE presented gripping, first-hand accounts of women who escaped the brutal reign of ISIS — and followed an underground network that helped them escape. (Aired 2015)
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In August 2014, ISIS massacred hundreds of men who were part of the Yazidi religious minority and took an estimated 3,000 Yazidi women and children captive. “Escaping ISIS” delivered a stunning look at the plight of those women and children, and the efforts of people trying to help them escape.
As the documentary reported, before ISIS overran his town in Northern Iraq, Khalil al-Dakhi was a lawyer. When ISIS seized territory in Iraq and Syria and declared a caliphate, al-Dakhi formed an underground railroad to help rescue those women and children held by ISIS.
Aeida, a 21-year-old Yazidi woman who was abducted by ISIS along with her two young children, talked about being held in a home that ISIS had turned into a prison for captured women. “Some nights I can’t sleep until the early morning hours because of the nightmares,” she said.
The documentary followed al-Dakhi and his team as they undertook the dangerous work of getting women like Aeida out of ISIS’ territory. It also followed the efforts of a cell smuggling secretly-shot footage of ISIS’ treatment of women out of ISIS-held territory.
Explore additional reporting related to “Escaping ISIS” on our website:
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FRONTLINE is produced at GBH in Boston and is broadcast nationwide on PBS. Funding for FRONTLINE is provided through the support of PBS viewers and by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Additional support for FRONTLINE is provided by the Abrams Foundation, Park Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Heising-Simons Foundation, and the FRONTLINE Journalism Fund, with major support from Jon and Jo Ann Hagler on behalf of the Jon L. Hagler Foundation, and additional support from Koo and Patricia Yuen.
CHAPTERS:
00:00 – Prologue
00:42 – An Underground Railroad to Rescue Yazidi Women and Children from ISIS
12:45 – A Yazidi Woman Describes ISIS Captivity
19:17 – Activists Secretly Film Life Under ISIS
30:59 – A Yazidi Family Escapes from ISIS & Other Survivors’ Stories
46:59 – A Message from Yazidis to ISIS: ‘We’re Staying’
51:49 – Credits
