Amid all the atrocities carried out by ISIS — its massacres
of civilians, its beheading of hostages, its pillaging of antiquities — the
systematic violence the jihadists have carried out against countless enslaved
women and girls never fails to shock.
For months now, we’ve heard appalling testimony from women
who escaped Isis’s clutches, many of whom endured rape and other hideous acts
of violence. See more..
Zainab Bangura, the U.N.’s special representative on sexual
violence in conflict, recently conducted a tour of refugee camps in the shadow
of the conflicts in Syria and Iraq, war-ravaged countries where the Islamic
State commands swaths of territory. She heard a host of horror stories from
victims and their families and recounted them in an interview earlier this week
with the Middle East Eye, an independent regional news site.
“They are institutionalizing sexual violence,” Bangura said
of the Islamic State. “The brutalization of women and girls is central to their
ideology.”
Bangura detailed the processes by which “pretty virgins”
captured by the jihadists were bought and sold at auctions.
Here’s a chilling excerpt: “After attacking a village, [the
Islamic State] splits women from men and executes boys and men aged 14 and
over. The women and mothers are separated; girls are stripped naked, tested for
virginity and examined for breast size and prettiness. The youngest, and those
considered the prettiest virgins fetch higher prices and are sent to Raqqa, the
IS stronghold.
There is a hierarchy: sheikhs get first choice, then emirs,
then fighters. They often take three or four girls each and keep them for a
month or so, until they grow tired of a girl, when she goes back to market. At
slave auctions, buyers haggle fiercely, driving down prices by disparaging
girls as flat-chested or unattractive.
We heard about one girl who was traded 22 times, and
another, who had escaped, told us that the sheikh who had captured her wrote
his name on the back of her hand to show that she was his ‘property’.”
Estimates vary, but there are believed to be somewhere
between 3,000 and 5,000 women enslaved by the Islamic State. Many are Yazidis,
a persecuted minority sect that the extremist Islamic State considers to be
apostate “devil-worshippers,” in part because of the Yazidis’ ancient
connection to the region’s pre-Islamic past. The jihadists’ treatment of Yazidi
women, in particular, has been marked out by its contempt and savagery.
Here’s Bangura again: “They commit rape, sexual slavery,
forced prostitution and other acts of extreme brutality. We heard one case of a
20-year-old girl who was burned alive because she refused to perform an extreme
sex act. We learned of many other sadistic sexual acts. We struggled to
understand the mentality of people who commit such crimes.”
“It was painful for me. The countries I have worked on
include Bosnia, Congo, South Sudan, Somalia and Central African Republic,” says
Bangura, a former former minister of Sierra Leone who is no stranger to
conflicts. “I never saw anything like this. I cannot understand such
inhumanity. I was sick, I couldn’t understand.”
In a separate interview with the Toronto Star, Bangura
warned that neither U.N. agencies nor regional authorities are currently able
to provide the sort of extensive care many of the escaped captives may need.
She said the resilience and ability of these women to build
back their lives would help “strip victory away” from the militants, reports
The Washington Post.
“This is precisely what [the Islamic State] does not want,”
says Bangura. “It can be a kind of vengeance, helping these women recover and
giving them a path to thrive.”
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