ISIS
enshrines a theology of rape
Claiming
the Quran’s support for rape, 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.
State
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.
“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 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.
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