This New York Times story moved me to tears. I cried after reading this story. No doubt, Devil is working overtime in Middle East. When I think of those poor children, I'm unable to fathom: God why this is happening? My daughter is of the same age -- barely 13 years.
The perpetrators of such crimes are misinterpreting the religious book to commit heinous crimes like abuse of children and slavery. I strongly believe this "theology of rape" is nothing but Devil's theory. They are possessed by Devil.
When I see the face of my daughter, my eyes become moist; children of my daughter's age are being abused, raped and sacrificed in some other part of the world... and I am unable to do anything to prevent it. I think the conscience of the world must wake up... God save those children.
LINK: (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/14/world/middleeast/isis-enshrines-a-theology-of-rape.html?_r=0).
NEW YORK TIMES STORY
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.
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 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 sIn 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.”
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 thereLabeled 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.
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.
