A recent programme in the Channel 4 documentary series called “Dispatches” examined the work of a Yazidi lawyer in Iraq who, with the help of other Yazidis, liberates Yazidi girls and women from slavery in the Islamic State. The programme provided a large audience with an insight into just how dreadful conditions are for girls and women in what may well be the most oppressive regime in the world. Below, I summarise some of the information shared with the Channel Four audience. Some of the testimony of the girls and women enslaved by the Islamic State is harrowing in the extreme.
And they abused, tortured and slaughtered the innocent (the story with no end)
It is estimated that some four million girls and women live under Islamic State rule. The Islamic State is the most brutal regime for women to live under anywhere in the world.
The Islamic State has the strictest dress code for girls and women anywhere on the planet. Girls from the age of eight or nine and all women are forced to cover themselves from head to toe and must not allow even their eyes to be seen. Older girls and all women have to wear two loose-fitting black gowns to completely disguise their body shape, gloves to cover their hands and three veils to ensure that their eyes are invisible to others (inevitably, the veils make it very difficult for girls and women to walk around with ease). If their eyes can be seen, girls and women can be tortured and/or lashed. If perfume is worn or a girl or woman raises her voice, arrest will follow.
Girls and women can leave their home only if accompanied by a close male relative. Non-Muslim girls and women are bought and sold in slave markets and can be sexually exploited by the males that buy them.
Foreign women who have travelled to the Islamic State to offer their support are often recruited into an armed police force that walks around enforcing the strict regulations so detrimental to all females’ needs and aspirations. Such foreign women have the right to punish girls and women who fail to comply with the laws, laws which are crude interpretations of sharia.
Yazidi women are often locked up in improvised prisons. One Yazidi woman who managed to escape from the Islamic State said:
In the prison where I was held there were 35 girls and three women, the oldest being me, 21 years-old. Men would arrive and rape and sexually assault us. One man wanted to rape a girl aged nine. I was angry and tried to stop him, but he said, “It’s okay in our religion to take a nine year-old girl. We can marry a nine year-old girl.”
In 2014, about 3,000 Yazidi girls and women were captured by Islamic State militants while trying to hide in the Sinjar Mountains in northern Iraq and taken to the heartland of the Islamic State as slaves. It is now known that some of the girls and women killed themselves to avoid being raped or sold in the slave markets. A survivor of sexual exploitation in the Islamic State said that girls and women who took their own lives were fed to the dogs.
Someone in the documentary said that a barrier like a wall was being built around the northern Iraqi town of Tal Afar (where in May 2015 it is alleged that about 500 Yazidis were executed by Islamic State militants) to stop people fleeing from Islamic State rule.
A woman aged 18 described her ordeal at the hands of Islamic State militants in the following way:
He dipped his toe in honey and forced it into my mouth. Once, six guards came into the room. They raped me through the night until the morning. They raped me not gently but fast, with force, without care. Then I was given to 12 men. All 12 of them, they did everything to me. I’m still in pain. I can’t sleep. I wake at three in the morning still smelling them. Their smell makes me brush my teeth more than ten times a day to get rid of their taste. It (the taste) will stay with me forever.
Many Yazidi women are forced to convert to Islam or face death.
A girl aged six was interviewed about what she remembered about life when she was in the Islamic State. She said:
It was all black.
An elderly Yazidi woman explained how she and other Yazidi women had to give blood to injured Islamic State militants in hospital.
Women accused of adultery are stoned to death. However, qur’anic requirements that proof of adultery must exist before stoning can begin are not adhered to. A mere accusation is sufficient to initiate the stoning. In one particularly harrowing sequence of film, a father is seen berating his daughter because she is believed to have engaged in adultery. He is then shown throwing a large stone at her, thereby contributing to her death.
And they abused, tortured and slaughtered the innocent (the story with no end)
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