ISIS Enshrines a Theology of Rape
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.
conquered regions of Iraq and Syria and uses the practice as a recruiting tool.
Written by RUKMINI CALLIMACHI; Photographs by MAURICIO LIMA
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.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 their 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.
Photo
Credit
Mauricio Lima for The New York Times
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 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
fellow “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.
Photo
Credit
Mauricio Lima for The New York Times
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 truly
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.”
Photo
Credit
Mauricio Lima for The New York Times
She
estimated there were at least 500 other unmarried women and girls in
the multistory building, with the youngest among them being 11 years
old. 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 female 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.
Photo
Credit
Mauricio Lima
for The New York Times
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 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.
Photo
Credit
Mauricio Lima for The New York Times
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.
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