By
M. Richard Maxson
“The
Constitution is utterly incompatible with Islam’s
main texts –
The Qur’an and the Hadith.”
-
William
Federer - What Every American Needs to Know about the Qur’an: A
History of Islam and the United States.
Our
Constitution is based on religious standards held by all true
religions around the world. Islam is not compatible with this
document because ISLAM IS NOT A RELIGION.
If
these true accounts of the suffering of human beings at the hands of
this murderous cult know as islam does not sicken and disgust you,
perhaps you had better check on your humanity and examine your soul.
Written
by RUKMINI CALLIMACHI
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, book-ending 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
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 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 its online magazine that its cam- paign
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 the magazine, 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
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 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,’’ she said. “We have indeed
raided and captured the kafirah women 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.
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.
