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 -Rukimini Callimachi
Ibleesis with their sex-slaves:
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.
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.
“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.
Calculated Conquest
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 Dohuk, near
Mount 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.”
Detailed reports by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International reach the same conclusion about the organized nature of the sex
trade.
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.
Mr. Barber, of the University of Chicago, said
that the focus on Yazidis was likely because they are seen as polytheists, with
an oral tradition rather than a written scripture. In the Islamic State’s eyes
that puts them on the fringe of despised unbelievers, even more than Christians
and Jews, who are considered to have some limited protections under the Quran
as “People of the Book.”
In Kojo, one of the southernmost villages on
Mount Sinjar and among the farthest away from escape, residents decided to
stay, believing they would be treated as the Christians of Mosul had months earlier.
On Aug. 15, 2014, the Islamic State ordered the residents to report to a school
in the center of town.
When she got there, 40-year-old Aishan Ali
Saleh found a community elder negotiating with the Islamic State, asking if
they could be allowed to hand over their money and gold in return for safe
passage.
The fighters initially agreed and laid out a
blanket, where Ms. Saleh placed her heart-shaped pendant and her gold rings,
while the men left crumpled bills.
Instead of letting them go, the fighters began
shoving the men outside, bound for death.
Sometime later, a fleet of cars arrived and the
women, girls and children were driven away.
The Market
Months later, the Islamic State made clear in
their online magazine that their campaign of enslaving Yazidi women and girls
had been extensively preplanned.
“Prior to the taking of Sinjar, Shariah
students in the Islamic State were tasked to research the Yazidis,” said the
English-language article, headlined “The Revival of Slavery Before the Hour,”
which appeared in the October issue of Dabiq.
The article made clear that for the Yazidis,
there was no chance to pay a tax known as jizya to be set free, “unlike the
Jews and Christians.”
“After
capture, the Yazidi women and children were then divided according to the
Shariah amongst the fighters of the Islamic State who participated in the
Sinjar operations, after one fifth of the slaves were transferred to the
Islamic State’s authority to be divided” as spoils, the article said.
In much the same way as specific Bible passages
were used centuries later to support the slave trade in the United States, the
Islamic State cites specific verses or stories in the Quran or else in the
Sunna, the traditions based on the sayings and deeds of the Prophet Muhammad,
to justify their human trafficking, experts say.
Scholars of Islamic theology disagree, however,
on the proper interpretation of these verses, and on the divisive question of
whether Islam actually sanctions slavery.
Many argue that slavery figures in Islamic
scripture in much the same way that it figures in the Bible — as a reflection
of the period in antiquity in which the religion was born.
“In the milieu in which the Quran arose, there
was a widespread practice of men having sexual relationships with unfree
women,” said Kecia Ali, an associate professor of religion at Boston University
and the author of a book on slavery in early Islam. “It wasn’t a particular
religious institution. It was just how people did things.”
Cole Bunzel, a scholar of Islamic theology at
Princeton University, disagrees, pointing to the numerous references to the
phrase “Those your right hand possesses” in the Quran, which for centuries has
been interpreted to mean female slaves. He also points to the corpus of Islamic
jurisprudence, which continues into the modern era and which he says includes
detailed rules for the treatment of slaves.
“There is a great deal of scripture that
sanctions slavery,” said Mr. Bunzel, the author of a research paper published
by the Brookings Institution on the ideology of the Islamic State. “You can
argue that it is no longer relevant and has fallen into abeyance. ISIS would
argue that these institutions need to be revived, because that is what the
Prophet and his companions did.”
The youngest, prettiest women and girls were
bought in the first weeks after their capture. Others — especially older,
married women — described how they were transported from location to location,
spending months in the equivalent of human holding pens, until a prospective
buyer bid on them.
Their captors appeared to have a system in
place, replete with its own methodology of inventorying the women, as well as
their own lexicon. Women and girls were referred to as “Sabaya,” followed by
their name. Some were bought by wholesalers, who photographed and gave them
numbers, to advertise them to potential buyers.
Osman Hassan Ali, a Yazidi businessman who has
successfully smuggled out numerous Yazidi women, said he posed as a buyer in
order to be sent the photographs. He shared a dozen images, each one showing a
Yazidi woman sitting in a bare room on a couch, facing the camera with a blank,
unsmiling expression. On the edge of the photograph is written in Arabic,
“Sabaya No. 1,” “Sabaya No. 2,” and so on.
Buildings where the women were collected and
held sometimes included a viewing room.
“When they put us in the building, they said we
had arrived at the ‘Sabaya Market,’” said one 19-year-old victim, whose first
initial is I. “I understood we were now in a slave market.”
She estimated there were at least 500 other
unmarried women and girls in the multistory building, with the youngest among
them being 11. When the buyers arrived, the girls were taken one by one into a
separate room.
“The emirs sat against the wall and called us
by name. We had to sit in a chair facing them. You had to look at them, and
before you went in, they took away our scarves and anything we could have used
to cover ourselves,” she said.
“When it was my turn, they made me stand four
times. They made me turn around.”
The captives were also forced to answer
intimate questions, including reporting the exact date of their last menstrual
cycle. They realized that the fighters were trying to determine whether they
were pregnant, in keeping with a Shariah rule stating that a man cannot have
intercourse with his slave if she is pregnant.
Property of ISIS
The use of sex slavery by the Islamic State
initially surprised even the group’s most ardent supporters, many of whom
sparred with journalists online after the first reports of systematic rape.
The Islamic State’s leadership has repeatedly
sought to justify the practice to its internal audience.
After the initial article in Dabiq in October,
the issue came up in the publication again this year, in an editorial in May
that expressed the writer’s hurt and dismay at the fact that some of the
group’s own sympathizers had questioned the institution of slavery.
“What really alarmed me was that some of the
Islamic State’s supporters started denying the matter as if the soldiers of the
Khilafah had committed a mistake or evil,” the author wrote. “I write this
while the letters drip of pride,’’ he said. “We have indeed raided and captured
the kafirahwomen and drove them like sheep by the edge of the sword.” Kafirah
refers to infidels.
In a pamphlet published online in December, the Research and Fatwa Department of the Islamic State
detailed best practices, including explaining that slaves belong to the estate
of the fighter who bought them and therefore can be willed to another man and
disposed of just like any other property after his death.
Recent escapees describe an intricate
bureaucracy surrounding their captivity, with their status as a slave
registered in a contract. When their owner would sell them to another buyer, a
new contract would be drafted, like transferring a property deed. At the same
time, slaves can also be set free, and fighters are promised a heavenly reward
for doing so.
Though rare, this has created one avenue of
escape for victims.
A 25-year-old victim who escaped last month,
identified by her first initial, A, described how one day her Libyan master
handed her a laminated piece of paper. He explained that he had finished his
training as a suicide bomber and was planning to blow himself up, and was therefore
setting her free.
Labeled a “Certificate of Emancipation,” the
document was signed by the judge of the western province of the Islamic State.
The Yazidi woman presented it at security checkpoints as she left Syria to
return to Iraq, where she rejoined her family in July.
The Islamic State recently made it clear that
sex with Christian and Jewish women captured in battle is also permissible,
according to a new 34-page manual issued this summer by the terror group’s
Research and Fatwa Department.
Just about the only prohibition is having sex
with a pregnant slave, and the manual describes how an owner must wait for a
female captive to have her menstruating cycle, in order to “make sure there is
nothing in her womb,” before having intercourse with her. Of the 21 women and
girls interviewed for this article, among the only ones who had not been raped
were the women who were already pregnant at the moment of their capture, as
well as those who were past menopause.
Beyond that, there appears to be no bounds to what
is sexually permissible. Child rape is explicitly condoned: “It is permissible
to have intercourse with the female slave who hasn’t reached puberty, if she is
fit for intercourse,” according to a translation by the Middle East Media
Research Institute of a pamphlet published on Twitter last December.
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.’ ’’
“And having sex with her pleases God,” he said.
-This article was published by the NEW YORK TIMES on the 14th of August 2015
