Warning: Graphic but important content.
While some trumpet ISIS’ social media savvy reports leak out of the regime daily showing it is running a territory that can only be described as hell on earth. It’s favorite victim: young girls.
In fact rape and sex slaves have become a major currency for the terrorist empire. Girls are currency, rewards for loyal service. Rape is both as a favorite past-time and tool of repression.
A United Nations official revealed shocking details about ISIS militants use of sexual violence.
Zainab Bangura, Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Sexual Violence in Conflict conducted interviews with dozens of sex slaves on her visits to various refugee camps in Syria, Iraq, Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan. All of the women had escaped ISIS detention, surviving horrific sexual assaults at the hands of so-called religious warriors.
Bangura said that ISIS routinely abducts young girls who are stripped naked, paraded and traded at slave markets in ISIS controlled cities in Iraq and Syria.
“The girls and children were treated like cattle.They are categorized and shipped naked off to Dohuk or Mosul or other locations to be distributed among ISIS leadership and fighters.”
The captive women are also prostituted out, or ‘married’ in ISIS parlance, to up to 20 fighters in a month. Soldiers loyal to the fanatical regime receive ‘brides’, who are often children, whom they repeatedly rape and then turn over to lesser soldiers.
In an area where medical help is scarce valuable resources are being used to facilitate this sexual violence. ISIS doctors are performing abortions on the young girls, some as young as 9, who were raped, in order to suppress evidence of their crimes.
One young woman was forced to marry 20 fighters and then undergo hymen restoration surgery each time to restore her virginity.
Special Representative Bangura fears that the thousands of children of raped women could become “a generation of stateless children, giving rise to future extremism.
Most of the victims are members of the Yazidi religious minority in Iraq. Around 40,000 of them were reportedly kidnapped by ISIS militants in August 2014 alone.
The vast magnitude of the crisis has prompted Baba Sheikh, a prominent Yazidi cleric in Iraq, to issue an unprecedented declaration that the women are victims who had suffered through no fault of their own and should be supported, not punished by the community.
The middle east has a victim-blaming culture, where women who are raped are often punished or ostracized even though the crimes have come through no fault of their own. The cleric’s statement show that the size of the problem is now too large to be ignored or swept under the rug in the traditional way.
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