UNITED STATES
Slate
By Joshua Keating
An important and horrifying feature by Rukmini Callimachi published today in the New York Times details ISIS’s “theology of rape,” the group’s deliberate and systematic practice of sexually enslaving women and girls from the Yazidi religious minority as it has expanded its territory in Iraq and Syria.
Based on interviews with 21 survivors, the article details how rape “has become deeply enmeshed in the organization and the radical theology of the Islamic State” since the group overran Yazidi territory in 2014. ISIS has created “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,” and issued a 34-page how-to manual with guidelines for rape. Its leaders have celebrated sexual assault as “spiritually beneficial, even virtuous.” A 12-year-old escapee, now living with her family in an Iraqi refugee camp, describes how an ISIS fighter would pray before and after raping her and explain that the Quran gave him the right to do so.
The deliberateness of ISIS’s system of sex slavery is unusually horrendous, but unfortunately ISIS is not the only armed group in the world today systematically using rape in warfare. It’s not even the only one in Syria: The rape of female prisoners is believed to be widespread in Bashar al-Assad’s prisons. Widespread, systemic rape has been a brutal part of modern conflicts in Africa, Europe, Latin America, and Asia and has been carried out by state and nonstate actors of every nationality and ideology.
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