The New York Times
Kidnapping and Sex Slavery: Covering ISIS’ Religious Justification for Rape
By ERIKA ALLEN
AUG. 14, 2015
Rukimini Callimachi has told the stories of those held as prisoners of the Islamic State before. This week, her front page article detailed the kidnapping, enslaving and ISIS-sanctioned rape of women and girls from the Yazidi religious minority.
Ms. Callimachi talked to Times Insider about the reporting process that lead to devastating first-person accounts from girls as young as 12-years-old who were separated from their families and sold as sex slaves to ISIS fighters.
Q: How did you discover this situation of the Islamic State enslaving and raping the Yazidi women and girls?
A: Soon after August 3 of last year, when ISIS attacked Sinjar Mountain [in Iraq], we started seeing reports of Yazidi women saying they had been raped. At first, we didn’t know what to make of the reports. They seemed exaggerated, and it seemed hard to believe they had enslaved large numbers of women.
Then in October of last year, the turning point for me was when ISIS published a feature article in their flagship magazine, Dabiq, entitled the “The Revival of Slavery Before the Hour.” To my horror, they laid out the fact that they had enslaved these women and explained in granular detail the theological justification for taking the Yazidis on the grounds that they are infidels and nonbelievers. They were citing Quranic passages and Islamic scholars who believe the principle that they could be enslaved.
That was the minute I became interested in this. I was busy with a lot of other things and couldn’t really come until July of this year. That was the beginning of it.
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