‘HE DESTROYED HER BODY’
The systematic rape of Yazidi girls deeply enmeshed in ISIL.
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
In the moments before he raped the 12-year-old girl, the ISIL fighter took the time to explain what he was about to do was not a sin. Because she practised a religion other than Islam, the Qur’an 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. “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 of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) in the year since the group announced it was reviving slavery as an institution. Interviews with 21 women and girls who recently escaped the jihadists, as well as an examination of the group’s official communications, illuminate how the practice has been enshrined in its 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, ISIL has developed a detailed bureaucracy of sex slavery, including sales contracts notarized by the Islamic courts it runs. The practice has also 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 ISIL’s research and fatwa department last month. Repeatedly, the group’s leaders emphasize a narrow and selective reading of the Qur’an and other religious rulings not only to 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 fight- er 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.
ISIL’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-coloured rock in northern Iraq.
Its valleys and ravines are home to the Yazidis, a tiny religious minority who represent less than 1.5 per cent 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 ISIL fighters.
Almost immediately, there were signs their aim this time was different.
Survivors say men and women were separated within the first hour of their capture. 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 chil- dren 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 Sinjar when the onslaught began last summer and helped create a foundation that provides psychological support for those who escaped, who number more than 2,000, according to community activists.
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 — aged 14, seven and four — were helplessly standing by their stalled car when a convoy of heavily armed ISIL 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 ISIL 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, they were forced to sit on each other’s laps, she said.
Her account 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 kilometres apart.
F says she was driven to Mosul about six hours away, where they were herded into the Galaxy Wedding Hall. Women were also 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 sent in smaller groups to Syria or to other locations in Iraq, where they were bought and sold for sex.
“It was 100 per cent 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 organ- ized nature of the sex trade.
Inside the voluminous Galaxy hall, F sat on the marble floor, squeezed between other adolescent girls. In all she estimates there were more than 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.
The girls described how three ISIL 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 in the Galaxy hall. Then one day, they came and began removing young women. Those who refused were dragged out by their hair, she said.
“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 ISIL leader explained it meant slave.
ISIL made clear in its online magazine that the campaign of enslaving Yazidi women and girls had been extensively planned.
“Prior to the taking of Sinjar, Shariah students in (ISIL) 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.
ISIL’s sex trade appears to be based solely on enslaving women and girls from the Yazidi minority.
The article also 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 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 some of the group’s sympathizers had questioned the institution of slavery.
“What really alarmed me was that some of (ISIL’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. We have indeed raided and captured the kafirah (infidel) women and drove them like sheep by the edge of the sword.” In a pamphlet published online in December, the research and fatwa department detailed best practices, including explaining 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.
ISIL recently made it clear that sex with Christian and Jewish women captured in battle is also permissible, according to a 34-page manual issued this summer by the department.
Just about the only prohibition is having sex with a pregnant slave. 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 pregnant when they were captured and 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 in December.
One 34-year-old Yazidi woman, who was bought and repeatedly raped by a Saudi fighter in the Syrian city of Shadadi, said 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.’ ”