Re: ISIS has executed 100 foreigners trying to quit: report
No, I would stay where I’m and would send terrorist to hell. This is reality of these barbarians that you want to rehabilitated.
Sex slavery pushes Iraq
BAGHDAD: The jihadi group ISIS has abducted women and children from Iraq’s Yazidi minority, distributed them as spoils of war and forced them into sexual slavery, driving some to suicide.
The group has targeted Yazidis and other minorities in northern Iraq in a campaign that rights group Amnesty International said Tuesday amounted to ethnic cleansing, murdering civilians and enslaving others for a fate that some captives consider worse than death.
“Many of those held as sexual slaves are children – girls aged 14, 15 or even younger,” Donatella Rovera, Amnesty’s senior crisis response adviser, who interviewed dozens of former captives, said in a statement.
Amnesty said that many of the perpetrators are ISIS fighters, but may also include supporters of the group.
A 19-year-old named Jilan committed suicide out of fear she would be raped, Amnesty quoted her brother as saying.
A girl who was held with her but later escaped confirmed the account, saying: “One day we were given clothes that looked like dance costumes and were told to bathe and wear those clothes. Jilan killed herself in the bathroom.”
“She cut her wrists and hanged herself. She was very beautiful; I think she knew she was going to be taken away by a man and that is why she killed herself.”
Another former captive told the rights group that she and her sister tried to kill themselves to escape forced marriage, but were stopped from doing so.
“We tied … scarves around our necks and pulled away from each other as hard as we could, until I fainted … I could not speak for several days after that,” Wafa, 27, told the rights group.
Amnesty also recounted the story of 16-year-old Randa, who was abducted with her family and raped by a man twice her age.
“It is so painful what they did to me and to my family,” Randa said.
ISIS has boasted of the horrors it has inflicted in its propaganda magazine “Dabiq.”
In an article entitled “The revival of slavery before the hour,” Dabiq argues that by enslaving people it claims hold deviant religious beliefs, ISIS has restored an aspect of Shariah. “After capture, the Yazidi women and children were then divided according to the Shariah among the fighters of [ISIS] who participated in the Sinjar operations,” the article said, referring to the area where the Yazidis were seized.
“This large-scale enslavement of mushrik [polytheist] families is probably the first since the abandonment of this Shariah law,” it said.
The abductions and rapes have drawn widespread international attention and condemnation.
ISIS “now proudly takes credit for the abduction, enslavement, rape, forced marriage and sale of several thousand … women and girls, some as young as 12 years old,” U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said in October.
The abuse causes long-term damage even to those who manage to flee.
Rovera said: “The physical and psychological toll of the horrifying sexual violence these women have endured is catastrophic.”
“Many of them have been tortured and treated as chattel. Even those who have managed to escape remain deeply traumatized.”
In day-to-day life, the group has also dramatically hemmed in women’s lives across the territory held by the group in Iraq and Syria, activists and residents say. Their movements are restricted and their opportunity for work has shrunk.
In Mosul, the biggest city in the group’s self-declared caliphate, “life for women has taken a 180-degree turn,” said Hanaa Edwer, a prominent Iraqi human rights activist. “They are forbidding them from learning, forbidding them from moving around freely. The appearance of a woman is being forcefully altered.”
At least eight women have been stoned to death for alleged adultery in ISIS-controlled areas in northern Syria, activists say.
At least 10 women in Mosul have been killed for speaking out against the group, Edwer said. In August, ISIS detained and beheaded a female dentist in Deir al-Zor who had continued to treat patients of both sexes, the U.N. said.
Relatives of women considered improperly dressed or found in the company of males who are not relatives are lashed or imprisoned. In the ISIS-controlled town of Al-Bab in Syria’s northern Aleppo province, an activist described seeing armed militants walking with a stick in hand, gently whacking or jabbing at women deemed inappropriately dressed.
“Sometimes they follow the woman home and detain her father, or they confiscate her ID and tell her to come back with her father to pick it up,” said Bari Abdelatif, now based in Turkey.
Enforcement varies from one place to the other, much of it depending on the whims of the Hisba, or vice police enforcing those rules. Most of the areas taken over by ISIS were already deeply conservative places where women had a subordinate role in society, but the extremists have sharply exacerbated the restrictions.
Abdelatif said women in Al-Bab are harassed for venturing outside their home without a “mahram,” or male guardian. In the Syrian city of Raqqa, the militants’ de facto capital, activists said women were allowed to leave their homes on their own, but needed a male companion or permission of a male relative to leave the city.
An all-female ISIS brigade, called Al-Khansa, patrols the streets in some areas to enforce clothing restrictions.
Across the territory, women now have to wear the “khimar,” a tent-like robe that covers the head, shoulders and chest. The khimar leaves the face exposed but very often the militants go ahead and force women to put a niqab veil over their faces as well, leaving only the eyes visible.
In the Iraqi city of Fallujah, an elementary school teacher said militants recently dropped by the school to deliver the niqab, robes and gloves for the students to wear.
“I used to wear makeup on occasion but I don’t anymore,” she said, speaking by phone on strict condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals.