KHANKE, Iraq — The posting in Arabic is chilling. A girl for sale: ‘‘Virgin. Beautiful. 12 years old . . . Her price has reached $12,500 and she will be sold soon.’’
The advertisement, along with others for kittens and weapons, appeared on an encrypted Telegram app and was shared with The Associated Press by an activist with Iraq’s persecuted Yazidi community, which is trying to free an estimated 3,000 women and girls still held as sex slaves by ISIS extremists.
As the Islamic State loses control of one city after another in its self-styled caliphate, it is tightening its grip on its captives, taking the Yazidis deeper into its territory and selling them as chattel on popular encrypted apps such as Telegram and WhatsApp.
The extremists are targeting smugglers who rescue captives for assassination and are deploying a slave database with captives’ photos and owners’ names to prevent escape through checkpoints.
Thousands of Kurdish-speaking Yazidis were taken prisoner and thousands more massacred when ISIS overran their northern Iraqi villages in August 2014. Since then, as the Yazidi captives have been conscripted into sexual slavery, smugglers have managed to free 2,554 women and girls. But by May, an ISIS crackdown reduced those numbers to just 39 in the last six weeks, according to figures provided by the Kurdistan regional government.
The AP has obtained a batch of 48 head shots of the captives, smuggled out by an escapee. The portraits appear to be the same ones in a database to prevent the captives from slipping past checkpoints, or for barter and sale on popular apps.
Mirza Danai, founder of the German-Iraqi aid organization Luftbrucke Irak, said the slave database documents the captives as if they were property.
‘‘They register every slave, every person under their owner, and therefore if she escapes, every Daesh control or checkpoint, or security force — they know that this girl . . . has escaped from this owner,’’ said Danai, using a common acronym to refer to ISIS.
One of those girls is Lamiya Aji Bashar, who in March made her fifth attempt at escape, running to the border with ISIS fighters in pursuit. A land mine exploded, and two Yazidi girls who were with her died. The bomb left Lamiya blind in her right eye, her face scarred.
Speaking from a bed at her uncle’s home in the northern Iraqi town of Baadre, the 18-year-told the the AP that despite being disfigured, she did not regret her perilous escape.
‘‘Even if I had lost both eyes, it would have been worth it,’’ she said, ‘‘because I have survived them.’’
The Yazidis are targeted because they practice an ancient faith combining elements of Islam, Christianity and Zoroastrianism, and the Sunni extremists of ISIS see them as infidels. The Yazidis’ prewar population in Iraq was estimated at 500,000. The number today is unknown.
The photos obtained by the AP depict girls in finery, some in makeup. They stare somberly. Some are barely teenagers. Not one looks older than 30.
Nazdar Murat is among them. She was about 16 when she was abducted along with more than two dozen girls and women. Inside an immaculate tent outside Dahuk, Nouri Murat, Nazdar’s mother, said her daughter managed to call once, six months ago.
‘‘We spoke for a few seconds. She said she was in Mosul,’’ said Murat, referring to Iraq’s second-largest city. ‘‘Every time someone comes back, we ask them what happened to her and no one recognizes her. Some people told me she committed suicide.’’ She is not sure whether to believe them.
Hussein Koro al-Qaidi, head of the Yazidi assistance committee in Dahuk, said no one has stepped up on the Yazidis’ behalf. And money to pay for smugglers or ransoms is running out, according to the Kurdish government and organizations working to save the women and children.
Contraband photos of captives offer families a thread of hope they might see them again. But they are also used by ISIS to sell them on Telegram and, to a lesser degree, Whats-App and Facebook, according to an activist who asked to remain unnamed. The activist showed the AP negotiations for the captives in real time on WhatsApp and Telegram, in private chats.
Facebook-owned WhatsApp and Telegram use end-to-end encryption to protect users’ privacy. Both have said they consider protecting private conversations and data paramount, and that they cannot access users’ content.
Telegram says it will remove illegal public content ‘‘when deemed appropriate.’’ WhatsApp can, under its terms of service, ban a phone number if it believes the user has submitted illegal content.
