How the Islamic State planned and created a vast system of sexual slavery

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Publié le jeudi 13 août 2015 20:21

Écrit par The New York Times

Affichages : 1883

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.

By RUKMINI CALLIMACHIAUG. 13,
2015

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.

Related Coverage

ISIS and the Lonely Young AmericanJUNE 27, 2015

Persecuted Yazidis Again Caught in Larger StruggleAUG. 11,
2014

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.

State of Terror

Articles in this series will examine the rise of the Islamic State and life
inside the territory it has conquered.

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

photo

A 15-year-old girl who wished to be identified only as F, right, with her
father and 4-year-old brother. “Every time that he came to rape me, he would
pray,” said F, who was captured by the Islamic State on Mount Sinjar one
year ago and sold to an Iraqi fighter. Credit Mauricio Lima for The New
York Times

“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 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.

Photo

Sunset over Dohuk, in the Kurdistan region of northern Iraq. Islamic State
militants have conquered large areas of Iraq, and the systematic rape of women
and girls from the Yazidi religious minority has become deeply enmeshed in the
group's organization and theology. Credit Mauricio Lima for The New York Times

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 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 fellow “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.

Photo

Aishan Ali Saleh, 40, at a refugee camp on the outskirts of Dohuk. She had
lived in Kojo, one of the southernmost villages on Mount Sinjar, which was
overrun by Islamic State fighters. Credit Mauricio Lima for The New York Times

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 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.”

Photo

A woman, who said she was raped by Islamic State militants, in a refugee
camp in the Kurdistan region of northern Iraq. Credit Mauricio Lima for The New
York Times

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 therefore setting her free.

Photo

A woman from the village of Tojo washing dishes in a refugee camp in
Kurdistan. She was held by the Islamic State from last August until June and
says she was sexually abused. Credit Mauricio Lima for The New York Times

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.

Photo

A 25-year-old Yazidi woman showed a “Certificate of Emancipation”
given to her by a Libyan who had enslaved her. 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. Credit Mauricio Lima for The New York Times

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.