The Islamic State in Iraq and Levant (ISIL) ushered in sexual slavery on August 03, 2014, when their 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.
The fatwa of Jihad-e Nikah, which stems from misogynistic view, was a slap in the face of humanity. Rape and honor killings are committed against women under the aegis of religious ideology. In the militants’ radical frames of mind, women are considered no more than a tool for satiating men’s carnal desires. In other words, women are doomed as inferior creature and born to serve as men’s slave with their eyes closed. To put it succinctly, women’s rights and dignity are violated flagrantly by the ISIL group in Iraq and Syria.
The systematic use of sexual violence to terrorize, humiliate and subjugate communities during times of war has a dark history, with an estimated 250,000 to 500,000 women raped in the 1994 genocide in Rwanda and 20,000 to 50,000 women raped during the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
And ISIL is not the only party in the Syrian civil war to use rape as a weapon – rape is endemic in detention centers run by the secular regime of Bashar al-Assad. But what makes ISIL’s use of rape so horrifying is its attempt to justify the practice using ostensibly religious justifications for this war crime.
ISIL believes that Yazidi women could be enslaved under their ideological beliefs that one-fifth of the women should be transferred to the ISIL leadership and the remainder divided among the fighters who participated in the conquest of Mount Sinjar. “Many well-known rulings are observed, including the prohibition of separating a mother from her young children.”
Based on its radical ideology, ISIL has gone about systematizing rape, sexual assault and slavery by embedding the buying, selling and gifting of slaves into a system of rewards for its fighters. Of the estimated 3,500 Yazidi women held by ISIL, survivors report being interrogated and in some cases stripped for sorting and categorizing. They have been rated according to desirability, labeled and transported across ISIL-held territory. They have been traded between fighters, and awarded by leadership as prizes.
“Although the Jolie-Hague summit reportedly trained more than 100 military peacekeepers and 700 Kurdish Peshmerga in ‘sexual violence prevention and response’, much more needs to be done to deal with the psychologically and medically traumatized Yazidi victims of the sexual slavery.” Claims also emerged two weeks earlier that the US hostage Kayla Mueller was repeatedly raped by ISIL leader al-Baghdadi.
The venom ISIL spews forth poisons the minds of naïve young girls around the world. It happened to some callow school girls – in foreign countries – to be lured to its ideology. According to a report, three young school girls fled to Syria from London to cooperate with the militants – through exposing their feminine charm to them. However, the question is that what are the main reasons behind their tendency towards ISIL’s attitude?
It is believed that those being lured to the ISIL’s radical practices either come from socially or culturally ill backgrounds or suffer from mental pressures in some ways. Presumably, they are humiliated in social or individual life, their natural and physical needs are not met, their mental or spiritual thirst is not quenched in a sound manner, their emotional desires are repressed and the lump in their throats erupts suddenly which diverts them from the normal path of life and they finally succumb to their emotions. In political term, it can be interpreted as a protest against the status quo.
Sharmeena, one of the three girls fled to Syria, is said to suffer emotionally. “She was vulnerable; she had a trauma,” said Mr. Akunjee, the lawyer, who does not represent Sharmeena’s family but is familiar with her case. “She didn’t get a body piercing or a drug-dealer boyfriend. She went to ISIS.”
Moreover, the motive behind girls’ tendency towards ISIL in West is stated as, “For the girls, joining ISIS is a way to emancipate yourself from your parents and from the Western society that has let you down,” Ms. Havlicek said. “For ISIS, it’s great for troop morale because fighters want Western wives. And in the battle of ideas they can point to these girls and say: Look, they are choosing the caliphate over the West.”
It is believed that a large number of the ISIL militants come from the deprived backgrounds – who failed to take the hands of beautiful girls – rather than real ideologues. They joined not to safeguard their ideology but to express their repressed emotions. The same is the case with the girls who join to support the militants emotionally. Hence, the psychologically and mentally dissatisfied individuals seem highly vulnerable to the ISIL’s toxic ideology.
So, those who stoop so low to join the radical militants trample upon ethical codes and religious tenets. Nothing is sacrosanct for them. They outrageously violate human’s rights and dignity. They sacrifice their beliefs and conscience to quench their lust for pleasure, power, etc. They succumb to their megalomania and selfishness without a sense of resistance.