‘Up to 60 lashes’ for women IS recruits who break the rules
FORMER members of Islamic State’s women’s unit have revealed how female recruits are lashed up to 60 times if they disobey the jihadi group’s strict rules.
The 600- strong elite Al Khanssaa Brigade, which includes an estimated 60 Britons, was set up by IS last year to crack down on women who don’t abide by its laws.
One 20-year- old, who fled to Turkey from IS’ main base in the Syrian city of Raqqa after her Saudi husband blew himself up in a suicide attack, explained the system of beatings.
‘If the woman tries to escape when we arrest her, then she’ll get 60 lashes,’ she said in a television interview.
‘Otherwise, when it comes to clothes, if she’s not wearing the abaya [Islamic dress] or she’s wearing high heels, then it’s the standard 40 lashes.’
One rule which i s strictly enforced is that women must be fully covered in public and always chaperoned by a male.
The woman admitted that she had personally administering lashings and said: ‘What upset me most was lashing old women when they weren’t wearing the proper clothes.
‘These women were like my mother. I mean for girls, yes, they should wear the proper attire; but old women, no. They’d lash them and humiliate them.’
Recruits to Al Khanssaa receive £70 a month and are given four weeks of weapons training.
Among the brigade’s most prominent figures are said to former Glasgow medical student Aqsa Mahmood, 20, and Londonborn Khadijah Dare, 22.
They are among the dozens of Britons who have travelled to Syria to join IS.
Mahmood left her home in Glasgow in November 2013 and became a jihadi bride shortly afterwards.
She has encouraged British Muslims t o commit t error attacks in the UK and faces ten years in jail if she ever returns.
The authorities are understood to have been monitoring her social media sites for more than A DEADLY attack on Australia’s First World War commemorations was foiled when British police found details of an alleged plot on a 14-year-old s choolboy’s computer, it emerged yesterday.
Officers tipped-off their Australian counterparts after finding communication between the boy and an Australian man while searching his home in Blackburn, Lancashire. He is held on suspicion of terror offences.
As a result, police smashed a gang of suspected Islamic State sympathisers who were allegedly planning a massacre at Anzac Day events.
Australian police seized knives and swords as they held five teenagers. Sevdet Besim, 18, was charged with conspiring to commit a terrorist act. Another youth faces weapons charges.
‘They would humiliate them’
a year since she entered Syria. She has used the internet to give others considering jihad advice on which clothes and make-up to take with them.
Her Twitter account, now taken down, was used to incite others to ‘follow the examples of your brothers from Woolwich’ – a reference to the brutal murder of soldier Lee Rigby.
Her family say that she could have been prevented from travelling to Syria, after she got in touch with them on her third or fourth day in Turkey.
Mahmood was concerned that another girl in her group had been taken into custody by the Turkish authorities.
Her parents i mmediately reported this to the police but, days later, she was able to go to Syria, where she is understood to be l i ving i n the town of Manbij.
Among other UK recruits are reported to be Salma and Zahra Halane, 16, twins from Manchester, and Muslim convert Sally Jones, 45, from Chatham, Kent. The unemployed mother has ranted online about how she
‘Wants to behead Christians’
‘wants to behead Christians with a blunt knife’.
Another 23-year- old recruit who fled to Turkey, said members mainly patrol streets, man checkpoints and raid houses.
Arab women were used to help run Raqqa’s administration, she explained. Like many women in the city, she said that she was married off to foreign fighters.
Her first husband was a Turkish IS commander, who was killed in battle. Months later, her parents made her marry an Egyptian, who left her behind after disagreeing with the IS and escaping.
She admits she never loved him, or her first husband: ‘I married him because it was what was available and the situation didn’t allow for anything else.
‘Most of the time I’d stay at my parent’s house because he wasn’t around. He behaved normally, he’d come home for two or three days and then he would go back to fight.
‘So in the whole year I probably saw him for less than a month altogether – and then he was martyred.’