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http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/14/world/middleeast/isis-enshrines-a-theology-of-rape.html
ISIS-ISLAMIC STATE 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.
August
13, 2015 |
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 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 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. ISIS ‘Slave Market Day’ In a video posted in October 2014 on YouTube, a group
of men believed to be Islamic State fighters are shown sitting in a room
bantering about buying and selling Yazidi girls on “slave market day.” 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.” A woman, who said she was raped by Islamic State
militants, in a refugee camp in the Kurdistan region of northern Iraq. 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.
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. A 25-year-old Yazidi woman showed a “Certificate
of Emancipation” given to her by a Libyan who had enslaved her. 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. 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. _________________________________________________________________________________________________________ |