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Qadiya, Iraq: In the moments before he raped the 12-year-old girl, the Islamic State fighter
took the time to explain that what he was about to do was not a sin. Because the preteen girl
practiced a religion other than Islam, the Quran not only gave him the right to rape her - it
condoned and encouraged it, he insisted.
He bound her hands and gagged her. Then he knelt beside the bed and prostrated himself in
prayer before getting on top of her.
When it was over, he knelt to pray again, bookending the rape with acts of religious
devotion."I kept telling him it hurts - please stop," said the girl, whose body is so small an
adult could circle her waist with two hands. "He told me that according to Islam he is allowed
to rape an unbeliever. He said that by raping me, he is drawing closer to God," she said in an
interview alongside her family in a refugee camp here, to which she escaped after 11 months
of captivity.
The systematic rape of women and girls from the Yazidi religious minority has become deeply
enmeshed in the organization and the radical theology of the Islamic State in the year since
the group announced it was reviving slavery as an institution. Interviews with 21 women and
girls who recently escaped the Islamic State, as well as an examination of the group's official
communications, illuminate how the practice has been enshrined in the group's core tenets.
The trade in Yazidi women and girls has created a persistent infrastructure, with a network of
warehouses where the victims are held, viewing rooms where they are inspected and
marketed, and a dedicated fleet of buses used to transport them.
A total of 5,270 Yazidis were abducted last year, and at least 3,144 are still being held,
according to community leaders. To handle them, the Islamic State has developed a detailed
bureaucracy of sex slavery, including sales contracts notarized by the Islamic State-run
Islamic courts. And the practice has become an established recruiting tool to lure men from
deeply conservative Muslim societies, where casual sex is taboo and dating is forbidden.
A growing body of internal policy memos and theological discussions has established
guidelines for slavery, including a lengthy how-to manual issued by the Islamic State
Research and Fatwa Department just last month. Repeatedly, the Islamic State leadership
has emphasized a narrow and selective reading of the Quran and other religious rulings to
not only justify violence, but also to elevate and celebrate each sexual assault as spiritually
beneficial, even virtuous.
WOMEN’S POWER: ITS PAST, ITS PRESENT, ITS FUTURE: FEMOCRACY
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