"How many IS fighters are around you? Are there more or less than before?" Shammo asks. She reassures the woman help is coming, inshallah, (God willing). "OK, darling, may God protect you," she says at the end of the call. Shammo looks into the camera: "At least I know she is OK. I can breathe normally again."
In another scene, she is on the phone with a local Arab tribal leader appealing to him to buy girls back. The appeal fails.
In one of the more poignant scenes, she interviews a 19-year-old who escaped and hears for the first time that captive women are forced to donate blood to wounded Islamic State fighters. Reuters and other news outlets ran with the story.
After the documentary, she received a series of death threats. Shammo has deactivated her Facebook account, changed mobile phone numbers and travels in secret. The Islamic State "has sleeper cells everywhere," she says.
In January, she met with members of parliament in the Netherlands and Belgium and with the International Criminal Court in The Hague to provide evidence of atrocities against Yazidis. The United Nations Human Rights Office in Switzerland offered her a fellowship.
What does she see in the future? "I have only one hope," she says. "To find my people free from IS and living in peace."
Ricchiardi, a former senior writer for American Journalism Review, works with the International Center for Journalists
Her e-mail arrived at 4:49 a.m. Nareen Shammo was tending to a 17-year-old girl who had been abducted, raped and sold into slavery by fighters of the Islamic State.
"She looks like a sad and hopeless angel," the former investigative reporter wrote from a hospital in northern Iraq on Feb. 10.
Shammo explained the teenager had escaped with other female captives during recent airstrikes against the invaders. Three of her sisters remain in the hands of killers who sexually attack, beat and sell women.
Frantic e-mails from Shammo began arriving in August. Fighters from the Islamic State, also known as ISIL or ISIS, were on a bloody rampage 30 miles from her home in Irbil, the bustling capital of Iraqi Kurdistan. She was stunned by accounts of massacres, torture and ethnic cleansing on her doorstep.
On Aug. 10, she wrote, "I really want to die. ... I am tired and very weak and trying to look strong." She was 28 and her world was falling apart.
When Shammo heard that the Islamic State was kidnapping hundreds of women and girls, she quit her job as a TV producer and reporter and focused on tracking the women and searching for ways to free them.
She made public appeals for help and discovered names of the missing on Facebook. Desperate relatives began contacting her. She learned some of the women kept cellphones hidden from their captors. Clandestine conversations became a lifeline for them.
Shammo discovered where they were being held and under what conditions. Women who escaped became her richest sources. What she learned was horrifying.
Girls, some as young as 13, awarded as prizes to Islamic State fighters; some forced into marriage. Women routinely raped, sold in slave markets and passed around as playthings. She heard accounts of forced conversions, suicides and babies ripped from mothers' arms.
Shammo's ethnic heritage was a driving force behind her activism.
She is a Yazidi, a religious minority ruthlessly targeted during the Islamic State's campaign to purge non-Islamic influences. A majority of the missing women belong to this group.
I met Shammo in February 2012 during a workshop in Amman, Jordan, sponsored by the International Center for Journalists. She was a brash, outspoken reporter who dominated discussions and pushed for guidance on her project on polluted water in Iraqi villages. Her dark eyes flashed with intensity when she talked about poison water killing people.
We worked together again in Casablanca, Morocco, where she was part of a prize-winning team reporting on the influx of foreign jihadists to Syria. We stayed in touch by e-mail, mostly making small talk, until the Islamic State arrived on the scene.
In January, BBC World News aired a documentary profiling Shammo. In one scene, she is in the back seat of a car on a rainy day, punching numbers into a pink cellphone. She had not been able to reach one of her contacts for days. This time, a familiar voice answers.
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