Islamic State Propagandists Boast of Sexual Enslavement of Women and Girls
By Robert Mackey
15 Oct, 2014
In the latest edition
of the Islamic State militant group’s glossy magazine, posted online this week,
its propagandists admitted for the first time that women and girls of the
Yazidi faith captured in Iraq had been treated as slaves and forced to marry
fighters.
The treatment of the
women — which appears to corroborate witness accounts from captives who escaped
areas that fell under militant control in Iraq — was described and defended in
an article with the headline “The Revival of Slavery” in the new issue of the
magazine, Dabiq, published Sunday.
According to the
anonymous author of the article, students of Islamic law in the militant group
decided that the enslavement of Yazidi women and girls, and their use as
“concubines,” was justified because their esoteric faith makes them “pagans”
whose religion needs to be eradicated from the Muslim world. “Their continual
existence to this day is a matter that Muslims should question as they will be
asked about it on Judgment Day,” the author wrote.
“Their creed is so
deviant from the truth that even cross-worshipping Christians for ages
considered them devil worshippers and Satanists,” the article added.
Members of the
religious minority who fled the militants’ advance in northwestern Iraq in
August told investigators from the United Nations that up to 500 Yazidi women
were “herded” into the town of Tal Afar in August, before about 150 of them
were sent to Syria to be given to Islamic State fighters or sold into sexual
slavery.
The frank admission by
the militant group’s propaganda arm coincided with the release of a Human
Rights Watch report, based on similar testimony from dozens of relatives of
Yazidis still being held by the militants, 16 captives who escaped and two
women currently in detention who managed to speak to researchers by telephone.
Witnesses also told
the researchers that captured men were forced to convert to Islam and that some
boys were taken away to be indoctrinated and trained as fighters. “We heard
shocking stories of forced religious conversions, forced marriage, and even
sexual assault and slavery — and some of the victims were children,” Fred
Abrahams, a Human Rights Watch adviser, said in the report.
The rights group’s
report was accompanied by video of escaped captives and relatives of those
still in detention describing their ordeal.
“They were hitting us and slapping us to make
us submit to them,” recalled a 17-year-old girl who managed to escape after
being taken to the city of Fallujah, west of Baghdad. “As much as we could, we
didn’t let them touch our bodies,” she said. “Everything they did, they did by
force.”
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/15/world/middleeast/islamic-state-propagandists-admit-sexual-enslavement-of-yazidis.html?_r=1