Claiming the Quran’s support, the Islamic State codifies sex slavery in conquered regions of Iraq and Syria and uses the practice as a recruiting tool.
QADIYA,
Iraq — In the moments before he raped the 12-year-old girl, the Islamic
State fighter took the time to explain that what he was about to do was
not a sin. Because the preteen girl practiced a religion other than
Islam, the Quran not only gave him the right to rape her — it condoned
and encouraged it, he insisted. He bound her hands and gagged her. Then he knelt beside the bed and prostrated himself in prayer before getting on top of her.
When it was over, he knelt to pray again, bookending the rape with acts of religious devotion. “I
kept telling him it hurts — please stop,” said the girl, whose body is
so small an adult could circle her waist with two hands. “He told me
that according to Islam he is allowed to rape an unbeliever. He said
that by raping me, he is drawing closer to God,” she said in an
interview alongside her family in a refugee camp here, to which she
escaped after 11 months of captivity.
The
systematic rape of women and girls from the Yazidi religious minority
has become deeply enmeshed in the organization and the radical theology
of the Islamic State in the year since the group announced it was
reviving slavery as an institution. Interviews with 21 women and girls
who recently escaped the Islamic State, as well as an examination of the
group’s official communications, illuminate how the practice has been
enshrined in the group’s core tenets.
Sate of Terror
Articles in this series will examine the rise of the Islamic
State and life inside the territory it has conquered.
The
trade in Yazidi women and girls has created a persistent
infrastructure, with a network of warehouses where the victims are held,
viewing rooms where they are inspected and marketed, and a dedicated
fleet of buses used to transport them.
A
total of 5,270 Yazidis were abducted last year, and at least 3,144 are
still being held, according to community leaders. To handle them, the
Islamic State has developed a detailed bureaucracy of sex slavery,
including sales contracts notarized by the ISIS-run
Islamic courts. And the practice has become an established recruiting
tool to lure men from deeply conservative Muslim societies, where casual
sex is taboo and dating is forbidden.
A
growing body of internal policy memos and theological discussions has
established guidelines for slavery, including a lengthy how-to manual
issued by the Islamic State Research and Fatwa Department just last
month. Repeatedly, the ISIS leadership has emphasized a narrow and
selective reading of the Quran and other religious rulings to not only
justify violence, but also to elevate and celebrate each sexual assault
as spiritually beneficial, even virtuous. “Every
time that he came to rape me, he would pray,” said F, a 15-year-old
girl who was captured on the shoulder of Mount Sinjar one year ago and
was sold to an Iraqi fighter in his 20s. Like some others interviewed by
The New York Times, she wanted to be identified only by her first
initial because of the shame associated with rape.
“He kept telling me this is ibadah,” she said, using a term from Islamic scripture meaning worship.
A 15-year-old girl who wished
to be identified only as F, right, with her father and 4-year-old
brother. “Every time that he came to rape me, he would pray,” said F,
who was captured by the Islamic State on Mount Sinjar one year ago and
sold to an Iraqi fighter.
“He
said that raping me is his prayer to God. I said to him, ‘What you’re
doing to me is wrong, and it will not bring you closer to God.’ And he
said, ‘No, it’s allowed. It’s halal,’ ” said the teenager, who escaped
in April with the help of smugglers after being enslaved for nearly nine
months.
The
Islamic State’s formal introduction of systematic sexual slavery dates
to Aug. 3, 2014, when its fighters invaded the villages on the southern
flank of Mount Sinjar, a craggy massif of dun-colored rock in northern
Iraq.
Its
valleys and ravines are home to the Yazidis, a tiny religious minority
who represent less than 1.5 percent of Iraq’s estimated population of 34
million.The
offensive on the mountain came just two months after the fall of Mosul,
the second-largest city in Iraq. At first, it appeared that the
subsequent advance on the mountain was just another attempt to extend
the territory controlled by Islamic State fighters.
Almost immediately, there were signs that their aim this time was different. Survivors
say that men and women were separated within the first hour of their
capture. Adolescent boys were told to lift up their shirts, and if they
had armpit hair, they were directed to join their older brothers and
fathers. In village after village, the men and older boys were driven or
marched to nearby fields, where they were forced to lie down in the
dirt and sprayed with automatic fire. The women, girls and children, however, were hauled off in open-bed trucks.
“The
offensive on the mountain was as much a sexual conquest as it was for
territorial gain,” said Matthew Barber, a University of Chicago expert
on the Yazidi minority. He was in Sinjar when the onslaught began last
summer and helped create a foundation that provides psychological support for the escapees, who number more than 2,000, according to community activists.
Fifteen-year-old
F says her family of nine was trying to escape, speeding up mountain
switchbacks, when their aging Opel overheated. She, her mother, and her
sisters — 14, 7, and 4 years old — were helplessly standing by their
stalled car when a convoy of heavily armed Islamic State fighters
encircled them.
“Right
away, the fighters separated the men from the women,” she said. She,
her mother and sisters were first taken in trucks to the nearest town on
Mount Sinjar. “There, they separated me from my mom. The young,
unmarried girls were forced to get into buses.”
The
buses were white, with a painted stripe next to the word “Hajj,”
suggesting that the Islamic State had commandeered Iraqi government
buses used to transport pilgrims for the annual pilgrimage to Mecca. So
many Yazidi women and girls were loaded inside F’s bus that they were
forced to sit on each other’s laps, she said.
Once
the bus headed out, they noticed that the windows were blocked with
curtains, an accouterment that appeared to have been added because the
fighters planned to transport large numbers of women who were not
covered in burqas or head scarves.
F’s
account, including the physical description of the bus, the placement
of the curtains and the manner in which the women were transported, is
echoed by a dozen other female victims interviewed for this article.
They described a similar set of circumstances even though they were
kidnapped on different days and in locations miles apart.
F
says she was driven to the Iraqi city of Mosul some six hours away,
where they herded them into the Galaxy Wedding Hall. Other groups of
women and girls were taken to a palace from the Saddam Hussein era, the
Badoosh prison compound and the Directory of Youth building in Mosul,
recent escapees said. And in addition to Mosul, women were herded into
elementary schools and municipal buildings in the Iraqi towns of Tal
Afar, Solah, Ba’aj and Sinjar City.
They
would be held in confinement, some for days, some for months. Then,
inevitably, they were loaded into the same fleet of buses again before
being sent in smaller groups to Syria or to other locations inside Iraq, where they were bought and sold for sex.
“It
was 100 percent preplanned,” said Khider Domle, a Yazidi community
activist who maintains a detailed database of the victims. “I spoke by
telephone to the first family who arrived at the Directory of Youth in
Mosul, and the hall was already prepared for them. They had mattresses,
plates and utensils, food and water for hundreds of people.”
In each location, survivors say Islamic State fighters first conducted a census of their female captives.
Inside
the voluminous Galaxy banquet hall, F sat on the marble floor, squeezed
between other adolescent girls. In all she estimates there were over
1,300 Yazidi girls sitting, crouching, splayed out and leaning against
the walls of the ballroom, a number that is confirmed by several other
women held in the same location.
They
each described how three Islamic State fighters walked in, holding a
register. They told the girls to stand. Each one was instructed to state
her first, middle and last name, her age, her hometown, whether she was
married, and if she had children.
For
two months, F was held inside the Galaxy hall. Then one day, they came
and began removing young women. Those who refused were dragged out by
their hair, she said.
In
the parking lot the same fleet of Hajj buses was waiting to take them
to their next destination, said F. Along with 24 other girls and young
women, the 15-year-old was driven to an army base in Iraq. It was there
in the parking lot that she heard the word “sabaya” for the first time.
“They
laughed and jeered at us, saying ‘You are our sabaya.’ I didn’t know
what that word meant,” she said. Later on, the local Islamic State
leader explained it meant slave.
“He
told us that Taus Malik” — one of seven angels to whom the Yazidis pray
— “is not God. He said that Taus Malik is the devil and that because
you worship the devil, you belong to us. We can sell you and use you as
we see fit.”
The
Islamic State’s sex trade appears to be based solely on enslaving women
and girls from the Yazidi minority. As yet, there has been no
widespread campaign aimed at enslaving women from other religious
minorities, said Samer Muscati, the author of the recent Human Rights Watch report. That assertion was echoed by community leaders, government officials and other human rights workers.
One
34-year-old Yazidi woman, who was bought and repeatedly raped by a
Saudi fighter in the Syrian city of Shadadi, described how she fared
better than the second slave in the household — a 12-year-old girl who
was raped for days on end despite heavy bleeding.
“He
destroyed her body. She was badly infected. The fighter kept coming and
asking me, ‘Why does she smell so bad?’ And I said, she has an
infection on the inside, you need to take care of her,” the woman said.
Unmoved, he ignored the girl’s agony, continuing the ritual of praying before and after raping the child.
“I
said to him, ‘She’s just a little girl,’ ” the older woman recalled.
“And he answered: ‘No. She’s not a little girl. She’s a slave. And she
knows exactly how to have sex.’ ’’
You cannot post new topics in this forum You cannot reply to topics in this forum You cannot delete your posts in this forum You cannot edit your posts in this forum You cannot create polls in this forum You cannot vote in polls in this forum