New York Times
By Rukimini Callimachi
August 13, 2015
Militants enshrine theology of rape: ‘Raping me is his
prayer to God’
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.
Guidelines
for slavery
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 its online magazine that its 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 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 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.
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.
A version of
this article appears in print on August 14, 2015, on page A1 of the New York Times
*******
Islamic State (ISIS) Releases Pamphlet On Female Slaves
December 4, 2014
The Research and
Fatwa Department of the Islamic State (ISIS) has released a pamphlet on the
topic of female captives and slaves. The pamphlet, which is dated Muharram 1436
(October/November 2014) and was printed by ISIS's publishing house, Al-Himma
Library, is titled Su'al wa-Jawab fi al-Sabi wa-Riqab ("Questions
and Answers on Taking Captives and Slaves"). It was presumably released in
response to the uproar caused by the many reports this summer that ISIS had
taken Yazidi girls and women as sex slaves. Written in the form of questions
and answers, it clarifies the position of Islamic law (as ISIS interprets it) on
various relevant issues, and states, among other things, that it is permissible
to have sexual intercourse with non-Muslim slaves, including young girls, and
that it is also permitted to beat them and trade in them.
The following are
excerpts from the pamphlet, which was posted on a pro-ISIS Twitter account.
"Al-Sabi is
a woman from among ahl al-harb [the people of war] who has been captured
by Muslims.
"Question 2:
What makes al-sabi permissible?
"What makes al-sabi
permissible [i.e., what makes it permissible to take such a woman captive] is
[her] unbelief. Unbelieving [women] who were captured and brought into the
abode of Islam are permissible to us, after the imam distributes them [among
us]."
"Question 3:
Can all unbelieving women be taken captive?
"There is no
dispute among the scholars that it is permissible to capture unbelieving women
[who are characterized by] original unbelief [kufr asli], such as the kitabiyat
[women from among the People of the Book, i.e. Jews and Christians] and
polytheists. However, [the scholars] are disputed over [the issue of] capturing
apostate women. The consensus leans towards forbidding it, though some people
of knowledge think it permissible. We [ISIS] lean towards accepting the consensus…"
"Question 4:
Is it permissible to have intercourse with a female captive?
"It is
permissible to have sexual intercourse with the female captive. Allah the
almighty said: '[Successful are the believers] who guard their chastity, except
from their wives or (the captives and slaves) that their right hands possess,
for then they are free from blame [Koran 23:5-6]'..."
"Question 5:
Is it permissible to have intercourse with a female captive immediately after
taking possession [of her]?
"If she is a
virgin, he [her master] can have intercourse with her immediately after taking
possession of her. However, is she isn't, her uterus must be purified
[first]…"
"Question 6:
Is it permissible to sell a female captive?
"It is
permissible to buy, sell, or give as a gift female captives and slaves, for
they are merely property, which can be disposed of [as long as that doesn't
cause [the Muslim ummah] any harm or damage."
"Question 7:
Is it permissible to separate a mother from her children through [the act of]
buying and selling?
"It is not
permissible to separate a mother from her prepubescent children through buying,
selling or giving away [a captive or slave]. [But] it is permissible to
separate them if the children are grown and mature."
"Question 8:
If two or more [men] buy a female captive together, does she then become
[sexually] permissible to each of them?
"It is
forbidden to have intercourse with a female captive if [the master] does not
own her exclusively. One who owns [a captive] in partnership [with others] may
not have sexual intercourse with her until the other [owners] sell or give him
[their share]."
"Question 9:
If the female captive was impregnated by her owner, can he then sell her?
"He can't
sell her if she becomes the mother of a child..."
"Question
10: If a man dies, what is the law regarding the female captive he owned?
"Female
captives are distributed as part of his estate, just as all [other parts] of
his estate [are distributed]. However, they may only provide services, not
intercourse, if a father or [one of the] sons has already had intercourse with
them, or if several [people] inherit them in partnership."
"Question
11: May a man have intercourse with the female slave of his wife?
"A man may
not have intercourse with the female slave of his wife, because [the slave] is
owned by someone else."
"Question
12: May a man kiss the female slave of another, with the owner's permission?
"A man may
not kiss the female slave of another, for kissing [involves] pleasure, and
pleasure is prohibited unless [the man] owns [the slave] exclusively."
"Question
13: Is it permissible to have intercourse with a female slave who has not
reached puberty?
"It is
permissible to have intercourse with the female slave who hasn't reached
puberty if she is fit for intercourse; however if she is not fit for
intercourse, then it is enough to enjoy her without intercourse."
"Question
14: What private parts of the female slave's body must be concealed during
prayer?
"Her private
body parts [that must be concealed] during prayer are the same as those [that
must be concealed] outside [prayer], and they [include] everything besides the
head, neck, hands and feet."
"Question
15: May a female slave meet foreign men without wearing a hijab?
"A female
slave is allowed to expose her head, neck, hands, and feet in front of foreign
men if fitna [enticement] can be avoided. However, if fitna is present,
or of there is fear that it will occur, then it [i.e. exposing these body parts
becomes] forbidden."
"Question
16: Can two sisters be taken together while taking slaves?
"It is
permissible to have two sisters, a female slave and her aunt [her father's
sister], or a female slave and her aunt [from her mother's side]. But they
cannot be together during intercourse, [and] whoever has intercourse with one
of them cannot have intercourse with the other, due to the general [consensus]
over the prohibition of this."
"Question
17: What is al-'azl?
"Al-'azl
is refraining from ejaculating on a woman's pudendum [i.e. coitus
interruptus]."
"Question
18: May a man use the al-'azl [technique] with his female slave?
"A man is
allowed [to use] al-'azl during intercourse with his female slave with
or without her consent."
"Question
19: Is it permissible to beat a female slave?
"It is
permissible to beat the female slave as a [form of] darb ta'deeb
[disciplinary beating], [but] it is forbidden to [use] darb al-takseer
[literally, breaking beating], [darb] al-tashaffi [beating for
the purpose of achieving gratification], or [darb] al-ta'dheeb [torture
beating]. Further, it is forbidden to hit the face."
Question 20: What
is the ruling regarding a female slave who runs away from her master?
"A male or
female slave's running away [from their master] is among the gravest of
sins…"
"Question
21: What is the earthly punishment of a female slave who runs away from her
master?
"She [i.e.
the female slave who runs away from her master] has no punishment according to
the shari'a of Allah; however, she is [to be] reprimanded [in such a way that]
deters others like her from escaping."
"Question
22: Is it permissible to marry a Muslim [slave] or a kitabiyya [i.e.
Jewish or Christian] female slave?
"It is
impermissible for a free [man] to marry Muslim or kitabiyat female
slaves, except for those [men] who feared to [commit] a sin, that is, the sin
of fornication…"
"Question
24: If a man marries a female slave who is owned by someone else, who is
allowed to have intercourse with her?
"A master is
prohibited from having intercourse with his female slave who is married to
someone else; instead, the master receives her service, [while] the husband
[gets to] enjoy her [sexually]."
"If a female
slave committed what necessitated the enforcement of a hadd [on her], a hadd
[is then] enforced on her – however, the hadd is reduced by half within
the hudud that accepts reduction by half…"
"Question
27: What is the reward for freeing a slave girl?
"Allah the
exalted said [in the Koran]: 'And what can make you know what is [breaking
through] the difficult pass [hell]? It is the freeing of a slave.' And [the
prophet Muhammad] said: 'Whoever frees a believer Allah frees every organ of
his body from hellfire.'"