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Whom can you enslave? What can you do with female slaves? Can you beat them and have sex with them? The US-backed militants of the self-styled Islamic State, never shy to parade their gruesome, atavistic interpretation of the Quran and its place as they see it in the modern world, have now answered those questions.
In a long list of the dos and don’ts governing the enslavement and treatment of women and girls captured by jihadi warriors, ISIS includes details of “permissible” sexual practices with female slaves. The new rules follow widespread reports this summer of the jihadis enslaving women from the Yazidi religious minority seized during the militants’ lightning offensive in northern Iraq.
Issued Dec. 3 by ISIS’s “Research and Fatwa Department,” the rules are laid out in question-and-answer format—a kind of “Slavery for Dummies.” It is permissible to beat slaves, trade them, and offer them as gifts, to take virgins immediately and to have sex with a pre-pubescent girl, “if she is fit for intercourse,” whatever that means.
According to Nazand Begikhani, an adviser to the Kurdistan regional government and researcher at the University of Bristol Gender and Violence Research Center, ISIS has kidnapped more than 2,500 Yazidi women. Yazidi activists, meanwhile, say they have compiled a list of at least 4,600 missing Yazidi women, seized after they were separated from male relatives, who were shot.
The women were bussed, according to firsthand accounts of women who have managed to flee, to the ISIS-controlled cities of Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria, and chosen and traded like cattle. Kurdish authorities in northern Iraq say they have freed about 100 Yazidi women. In October, ISIS justified its enslavement of the women—and of any non-believing females captured in battle—in its English-language digital magazine Dabiq. Islamic theology, ISIS propagandists argued, gives the jihadis the right, much in the same way that the Bible’s Ephesians 6:5 tells “Slaves, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling.”