When ISIS came for Zeinat and her family, they ran, terrified, for the safety of the mountains. They had heard the horror stories and knew only too well what might happen to them if they stayed in their home. But they were too late; stranded at the foot of Iraq's Mount Sinjar by the huge crowds of refugees struggling uphill, they were easy pickings when fighters arrived. Separated first from her father, and then from her sisters, she was forced -- like thousands of Yazidi women -- into slavery, treated as the property of the so-called "Islamic State."
Zeinat, though, wasn't working for ordinary rank-and-file ISIS militants; instead she was handpicked to serve terror boss Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and his family and friends.
Speaking exclusively to CNN, Zeinat (not her real name), 16, has told of how al-Baghdadi beat and mistreated her. She also says he raped American hostage Kayla Mueller, who was held captive by the group after being taken hostage in 2013.
"He treated us so badly," she says, her beautiful, expressive blue eyes peering out fearfully from behind a rust-red tasseled headscarf as she relates her harrowing ordeal at the hands of one of the world's most wanted men.
"He would always tell us: Forget your father and your brothers. We have killed them. And we have married off your mothers and sisters. Forget them."
Selected by the terrorist leader -- though she did not know who he was at the time -- at a slave market in "a white palace ... between the mountain and the sea," Zeinat and eight other girls were taken to his home in Raqqa, Syria, the de facto capital of ISIS' territory.
As soon as she arrived, she says, she was made to watch a video showing ISIS fighters beheading a Westerner and threatened with the same fate unless she agreed to abandon her Yazidi faith.
"There was a journalist, an American journalist, and there was a man dressed all in black," she remembers. "He killed the journalist. He beheaded him." Zeinat's description matches widely circulated ISIS videos of the killings of James Foley, Steven Sotloff and other Western hostages.
Deadly ultimatum
"(Al-Baghdadi) showed us this on the laptop, and they said to me, 'If you don't convert to Islam, this will happen to you -- we will behead all of you,'" she recalls.
"'You have two choices,' they said. 'Convert to Islam. Or die like this.'"
The Yazidis, a small Iraqi minority who believe in a single god who created the Earth and left it in the care of a peacock angel, have been subjected to large-scale persecution by ISIS, which accuses them of devil worship.
ISIS militants have kidnapped, raped, tortured and massacred thousands of Yazidis; the United Nations has accused ISIS of committing genocide against them.
Al-Baghdadi and his family were constantly moving from one home to another, one town to the next, Zeinat says; the day after she arrived, an airstrike destroyed the house next door, forcing the entire household to pack up and move on.
Zeinat says she was beaten by al-Baghdadi, who insisted she and the other women "belonged" to ISIS, and taunted by his three wives and six children while cooking and cleaning for them. In the face of such brutal abuse, she became determined to run away. On one occasion, she and others managed to steal the keys to the house they were being held in.
"We got the key and unlocked the door. We ran and ran ... we saw a house just outside Aleppo ... and there was an Arab woman. She said, 'Come in, come in. I will help you and bring you to Iraq.' ... She said ... she would help us, but then she called Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi."
"They beat us all over our bodies," she recalls. "We were completely black from the beating. They beat us with everything: cables, belts and wooden sticks.
"(Al-Baghdadi) hit me (with a) garden hose and (a) belt. Then he slapped my face and my nose bled," she says, touching her left cheek to indicate where the blows fell. Zeinat's arm was dislocated, she says: "Even now, when I carry something I still feel pain." Her friend suffered a broken bone in her face.
