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"Every time that he came to rape me, he would pray," said F, a 15-year-old girl who was captured
on the shoulder of Mount Sinjar one year ago and was sold to an Iraqi fighter in his 20s. Like
some others interviewed by The New York Times, she wanted to be identified only by her first
initial because of the shame associated with rape.
"He kept telling me this is ibadah," she said, using a term from Islamic scripture meaning
worship.
"He said that raping me is his prayer to God. I said to him, 'What you're doing to me is wrong,
and it will not bring you closer to God.' And he said, 'No, it's allowed. It's halal,'" said the
teenager, who escaped in April with the help of smugglers after being enslaved for nearly nine
months.
Calculated Conquest
The Islamic State's formal introduction of systematic sexual slavery dates to Aug. 3, 2014, when
its 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.
Almost immediately, there were signs that their aim this time was different.
Survivors say that men and women were separated within the first hour of their capture.
Adolescent boys were told to lift up their shirts, and if they had armpit hair, they were directed to
join their older brothers and fathers. In village after village, the men and older boys were driven
or marched to nearby fields, where they were forced to lie down in the dirt and sprayed with
automatic fire.
The women, girls and children, however, were hauled off in open-bed trucks.
"The offensive on the mountain was as much a sexual conquest as it was for territorial gain,"
said Matthew Barber, a University of Chicago expert on the Yazidi minority. He was in Sinjar
when the onslaught began last summer and helped create a foundation that provides
psychological support for the escapees, who number more than 2,000, according to community
activists.
Fifteen-year-old F says her family of nine was trying to escape, speeding up mountain
switchbacks, when their aging Opel overheated. She, her mother, and her sisters - 14, 7, and 4
years old - were helplessly standing by their stalled car when a convoy of heavily armed Islamic
State fighters encircled them.
"Right away, the fighters separated the men from the women," she said. She, her mother and
sisters were first taken in trucks to the nearest town on Mount Sinjar. "There, they separated me
from my mom. The young, unmarried girls were forced to get into buses."
The buses were white, with a painted stripe next to the word "Hajj," suggesting that the Islamic
State had commandeered Iraqi government buses used to transport pilgrims for the annual
pilgrimage to Mecca. So many Yazidi women and girls were loaded inside F's bus that they were
forced to sit on each other's laps, she said.
Once the bus headed out, they noticed that the windows were blocked with curtains, an
accouterment that appeared to have been added because the fighters planned to transport large
numbers of women who were not covered in burqas or head scarves.
F's account, including the physical description of the bus, the placement of the curtains and the
manner in which the women were transported, is echoed by a dozen other female victims
interviewed for this article. They described a similar set of circumstances even though they were
kidnapped on different days and in locations miles apart.
F says she was driven to the Iraqi city of Mosul about six hours away, where they herded them
into the Galaxy Wedding Hall. Other groups of women and girls were taken to a palace from the
Saddam Hussein era, the Badoosh prison compound and the Directory of Youth building in
Mosul, recent escapees said. And in addition to Mosul, women were herded into elementary
schools and municipal buildings in the Iraqi towns of Tal Afar, Solah, Ba'aj and Sinjar City.
WOMEN’S POWER: ITS PAST, ITS PRESENT, ITS FUTURE: FEMOCRACY
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