Women’s
Voices Must Stay ‘Alive’ in ISIS-Controlled Regions
By Yermi Brenner on Aug 31, 2014
Iraqi
refugees finding safety in Dohok in August 2014 in the semiautonomous region of
Kurdistan during the siege by the extremist group called Islamic State of Iraq
and Syria. The refugees had fled Shangal, in the region. WADI
The extremist Sunni militant
group called Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, which recently declared a caliphate in parts of the Middle East, now
controls an area of 13,000 square miles in Iraq
and Syria. Testimonies coming out about daily life in the
ISIS-controlled region depict an agenda of fear and intimidation being imposed,
one that targets women with repression and violence.
Jetteke van der Schatte
Olivier, who works with women’s rights organizations in conflict areas,
maintains regular contact with people living in the vast region that ISIS has
captured, an area that the United States, the Kurdish pesh merga military in northern Iraq and the Iraqi military have been hammering at the last
few weeks. Van der Schatte Olivier is a program officer for Women
on the Frontline, an initiative of the international nonprofit
organization Hivos, based in The
Hague, to support women’s
participation in the political process in Middle East
and North African countries.
Speaking with PassBlue in
August, van der Schatte Olivier, who was in Iraq in July, said that women’s
safety and freedom have significantly deteriorated since ISIS took over, and
that rape is being used has a weapon of war.
“There are talks of forced
marriages, jihad marriages,” she said by phone from her office in the Netherlands. “Women are used to please the men who are fighting and
to provide them with children. These stories have not been backed up with very
clear data. But given the amount of stories and some of the personal stories we
heard — it is clearly happening.”
In July, during van der Schatte
Olivier’s last visit to Iraq, she was confined to Erbil,
the capital of the Kurdish autonomous region. Just a few weeks before her
visit, on June 10, ISIS took over the city of Mosul,
which is located 55 miles east of Erbil. Therefore, traveling anywhere in Iraq
— even to the capital, Baghdad — was deemed too risky for van der Schatte Olivier.
In Erbil, she met with members
of the organizations that are part of the Women on the Frontline program, who
came from all across Iraq. Her goal was to research how the increasing violence is
affecting their work and daily life. “One of the organizations that we work
with — their office has been taken by IS [or ISIS].
All their documents have been taken,” she said about Wavin,
a nongovernmental organization that lobbies for women’s rights in northern Iraq. “The staff had to flee to the mountains where the
minorities were, and they had to wait to be rescued just like the others.”
Van der Schatte Olivier learned
that women who have not escaped ISIS-controlled areas are being confined to
their houses, not even allowed to go to the market. Reports in the last few
months describe women facing “a terrible ordeal” that includes kidnapping and sexual slavery. Thousands have
been murdered or are unaccounted for. Many others
have been pushed into desperate and dangerous situations.
When ISIS took over Mosul,
which is Iraq’s second-largest city, with 1.5 million people, the
militants published a list of 16 guidelines for local people. The so-called
“Contract of the City” includes directives that keep women at home except for
emergency cases and orders them to wear the niqab, or head-to-toe robe, when
they are out, The Washington Post reported. A wife and
husband in the city were whipped by militants because the woman donned only a
headscarf and not the niqab, said a report by EPIC, a youth-empowering peace group
in Iraq.
Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, the
executive director of UN Women, the UN agency devoted exclusively to women’s
issues, expressed outrage at the deliberate targeting of women and girls in Iraq.
“We are deeply concerned by
recent reports that four women have committed suicide after being raped or
forced to marry IS militants as well as reports of men committing suicide after
being forced to watch their wives and daughters being raped,” Mlambo-Ngcuka
said in a press release. “UN Women strongly condemns
sexual and gender-based violence, and calls on all parties to address such
reports and protect the rights of Iraqi women and girls.”
The UN has also documented war
crimes being committed by ISIS. The militant group’s conquests made June the deadliest month in Iraq since 2007. With the help of US
airstrikes, Kurdish fighters have managed to recapture some ISIS-held areas in
August, including the strategically important Mosul dam. But ISIS is far from being defeated, and as war
rages, women throughout the country — and in Syria — are increasingly marginalized.
Women have
been subjected to violence, repression and kidnappings during the ISIS
takeover. Here, a family that has evaded capture by ISIS,
seeking refuge in Dohok. WADI
“Basically, the fact that there
is war reduces the ability of women to be politically active,” van der Schatte
Olivier explained. “Men tend to dominate the war arenas and women get pushed
back.”
Van der Schatte Olivier pointed
out that women whose husbands are killed often find themselves in dire social
and economic situations. She said that in some war zones, however, women have
taken on the major role of defusing violence. She mentioned several communities
in Syria where women have taken on the role of reaching out to
other groups to talk, making sure communication lines between various minority
groups stay open.
“I don’t think that women are
more morally advanced than men or anything like that, but I do think women have
a very clear role in trying to smooth the biggest extremism and the biggest
extremist that exist in groups,” she said. “Women can have a very strong role
convincing the men to lay down their weapons.”
Such influence by women is not
likely to happen in areas controlled by ISIS,
according to van der Schatte Olivier, since the militant group sees women as
subjects, without rights. She finds it hard to be optimistic about the region’s
future. It is clear that in areas where ISIS
prevails, organizations promoting empowerment of women have no future.
Nevertheless, van der Schatte
Olivier is convinced that helping local activists weather the ISIS storm is
critical for Iraq’s rebuilding process. “If the critical voices are shut
down, any chance for a democracy is very slim because these are the people that
try to bring out change and to advance human rights and liberal standards,” she
said. “I think it’s very important that we make sure that we keep those voices
alive.”
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