by Meredith Tax
On another day she wrote, “Today, a Tunisian fighter stopped me because of my Islamic dress code. I ignored her and walked away but I wished that I had a pistol to kill her. I wanted to stop this humiliation, these guys built their power on us. I’m sick of them and their power. I’m sick of being a second-class citizen. God, please help us.”
Members of RBSS, to whom she sometimes sent articles, warned her to be more careful. A cousin told her not to post her picture on Facebook or she would be targeted, but that made her angry and she deleted him from her page. “She was stubborn and wanted to show the truth of what is happening, no matter what the cost,” he said. She was arrested in the summer of 2015. Her family went to the prison every day, but were never given any news or allowed to see her. Finally, on New Year’s Day, 2016, Daesh told her brother that she and five other women had been executed. They refused to give the family her body.
Her last Facebook post said “I’m in Raqqa and I received death threats. When Isil arrest me and kill me it’s OK, because [while] they will cut [off] my head I will have dignity, which is better than living in humiliation.”
People’s Protection Unit (YPG) patrol truck, Tel Hamis, Cizire Canton, Rojava.
CHAPTER 9
Daesh vs. Kobane
IN THE SPRING OF 2015, Zainab Bangura, the UN Special Rapporteur on Sexual Violence in Conflict, made a tour of camps housing Syrian refugees from Daesh. She was no stranger to the horrors of war, having worked in the conflict zones of Bosnia, Congo, South Sudan, Somalia, and the Central African Republic, but she was sickened as never before by what she heard from women who had been captured by Daesh. “It was painful for me,” she said. “I never saw anything like this. I cannot understand such inhumanity.”1
Vian Dakhil, a Yazidi Member of the Iraqi Parliament, and her younger sister Deelan became spokeswomen for these enslaved women and girls. Deelan worked in the refugee camps in northern Iraq that housed many former captives. In December 2015, she was interviewed by a reporter for the Daily Mail, who wrote, “The stories she recounts sound like something from a horror film. One in particular stands out: that of a mother and her nine-year-old daughter. But one morning a man, thought to be in his 50s, decided he would take the little girl instead of one of the women. The mother was distraught, and fought to protect her, but it was in vain. The fighters shot her in the head, leaving her body lying on the floor. The fighter took the little girl: the woman who recounted the story to Deelan still hears her screams every night as she goes to sleep. ‘They raped her, but her small body could not tolerate it, and from the first sexual experience she bled to death and she died,’ Deelan told the audience in London. The first girl Deelan helped after escaping had thrown herself from a second-floor window and walked for three days to find safety. She had been sold six times, from fighter to fighter. Each time, she was raped every day. The last time her ‘price’ had dropped to just a cigarette.”2
In 2014, Daesh had published a guide to the proper treatment of female slaves, which contained answers to such questions as “Is it permissible to have intercourse with a female captive immediately after taking possession of her?” The answer was yes, as long as she was a virgin. If she was not, her uterus had to be “purified” first, although it did not explain how to do that. Another question: “Is it permissible to have intercourse with a female slave who has not reached puberty?” Yes, as long as she is “fit for intercourse; if not, then it is enough to enjoy her without intercourse.” Many salafis consider it acceptable to have sex with young girls, following the example of the Prophet, whom religious texts say married his last wife, Aisha, when she was six and consummated the marriage when she was nine. Apparently some fighters had been overstepping even the minimal restrictions placed on them, since Daesh subsequently published a series of fatwas laying down refinements, including the rule that it was not permissible to sleep with both a mother and her daughter.3
Because of the Daesh code separating the sexes, the policing of women had to be done by other women. In Raqqa and Mosul, the rules were enforced by the al-Khanssa Brigade, an all-female police force established a few months after Daesh took over the city. As a Daesh official said, “We have established the brigade to raise awareness of our religion among women, and to punish women who do not abide by the law. . . . Jihad is not a man-only duty. Women must do their part as well.”4
For Sunni women, there was an elaborate, onerous dress code that reached extremes undreamed of by the Taliban. Not only were women required to wear a full burqa or niqab—a long black head-to-toe garment, with another black waist-length garment covering their head—and hide their faces behind so many veils they could hardly see; in addition, unmarried women were supposed to wear a white scarf over their faces underneath, to denote their availability for marriage. Color-coded veils were also required for other marital conditions: black for married women, green for widows, and blue for divorced.5
These rules were laid out in a manual written by the media committee of the al-Khanssa Brigades, published in January 2015. The manual targeted women in Arab countries, particularly Saudi Arabia.6 In it, the dress code was discussed not only in terms of religion but of anticolonialism, and was framed as the right to be veiled: “In the years of mental and military colonialism, this right was banned by force or persuasion. Faces were forcibly revealed for identity checks to denote national identity. Women would not be allowed to travel out of the country unless they had a passport with a photo of their face in it.”7
Dress code violation was a serious crime. In July 2015, a resident of Raqqa named Dalia told Syria Deeply, an independent online news source, “One of my neighbors was walking with her husband and she had forgotten to wear the ‘shield,’ a rectangular piece of thick material that stretches from eyes to knees. It was recently imposed in addition to the niqab. The Daesh police arrested him and his wife; they punished him with 100 lashes and forced him to pay a 25,000-pound ($137) fine. He divorced his wife out of anger at the same place where ISIS punished him.”8
That same month, a seventeen-year-old married woman was in the market in Mosul with a group of friends. They lifted their veils to examine some clothes on display because it was impossible to see clearly through all the layers of fabric covering their faces. Members of an all-Russian (probably Chechen) Al-Khanssa Brigade rushed over and beat the offenders so severely that the seventeen-year-old died.9
The white veil for unmarried women was of particular interest to the Al-Khanssa Brigades: “When the female police spot the white scarf,” a woman in Raqqa told a reporter from Syria Deeply, “they approach these women and their families, and often harass them, to ask for their hands for the Arab and foreign fighters who are looking for wives. Not many Raqqa families have married their daughters to ISIS fighters, but the ones who did have many privileges. Families that did not accept were picked on and punished for the slightest mistake.”10
Three Raqqa girls who married fighters, and whose families benefitted as a result, escaped from Raqqa and told their stories to a reporter from The New York Times in November 2015. They complained that, as Syrians, they were held in much lower status by Daesh than the foreign girls who came to Raqqa. Though one young woman, named Dua, fell in love with her husband and wanted to have children, she was forced to take birth control pills because Daesh did not want its fighters held back from suicide by becoming fathers. When Dua’s husband blew himself up, she found she was expected to marry another fighter almost immediately, even though that was contrary to Islam. As the Times reported, “Under nearly universal interpretations of Islam, a woman must wait three months before remarrying, mainly to establish the paternity of any child that might have been conceived. The waiting period, called idaa, is not only required but is a woman’s right, to allow her to grieve. But even in the realm of divine law, the Islamic State was reformulating everything.
“‘I told him that I still couldn’t stop crying,’ Dua said. ‘I said: “I’m heartbroken. I want to wait the whole t
hree months.”’ But the commander told her she was different from a normal widow. ‘You shouldn’t be mourning and sad,’ he said. ‘He asked for martyrdom himself, and you are the wife of a martyr. You should be happy.’”11
Syria Deeply reported the story of another woman, Lina, who was arrested for an infraction against the dress code. “Her husband was not around. The ISIS police freed her after three days. Her husband got suspicious. He asked her if ISIS fighters or police did anything to her. She said no. A few days later, he was not convinced, so he demanded she swear on the Koran that she was telling the truth. She could not lie. The truth was a horrifying story. She said that she was raped repeatedly every hour by a different ISIS fighter. Her husband divorced her on the spot.”12
Veteran reporter Rania Abouzeid reported on the website Politico that she heard a similar story in a village in Idlib Province, where she was interviewing the wife of a Jabhat al-Nusra emir. A woman “relayed a tale about a crying woman who marched into the Nusra outpost one day, took off her hijab and told the emir she no longer wanted to be a Muslim. She said seven ISIL members had ‘married’ her, one after the other, in the same night. It was gang rape. “This is not our religion,” the emir’s mother said.”13
These stories were very different from the romantic fictions being pushed by online recruiters for Daesh, which featured an idyllic religious commonwealth which women could share with men as long as they kept to their prescribed roles. Women of the Islamic State: A Manifesto by the Al-Khanssa Brigade presented an image of this ideal society: seventh century Arabia. “If we look back to the Prophet’s community in Medina, it was the best of communities. With the best leaders, absolutely and indisputably. While it was a very simple society in terms of the material world and worldly sciences, it was strong in terms of its faith and the science of the next. People in it were hungry more than they were satisfied. They had houses of palm and mud, rode camels and horses and did not know physics, engineering or astronomy. Because of all this, God was kept at the forefront, and the Righteous were His slaves.”14
The problem, according to the al-Khanssa manifesto, was that Muslims had forgotten that the purpose of their existence was to worship God. They had befriended the wrong people, including infidels and UN agencies, and looked to them for leadership. Relations between women and men had gone awry because women had forgotten that their one duty was to be a good wife and mother and had started to work outside the home, thus emasculating men.
Anyone familiar with the history of the struggle for women’s emancipation will recognize these arguments, which have been made all over the world by conservatives of every religion. The starting premise is that men and women are different in essence. There is a wall between them and if you make a chink in it, society will fall apart: “Women have this Heavenly secret in sedentariness, stillness, and stability, and men its opposite, movement and flux, that which is the nature of man, created in him,” according to the manifesto. “If roles are mixed and positions overlap, humanity is thrown into a state of flux and instability. The base of society is shaken, its foundations crumble and its walls collapse.”15
When women go outside the home, they thus take the fatal step that leads to the destruction of society. There are a few exceptions: Women may leave their houses to study sharia; women doctors and teachers may work as long as they keep to sharia guidelines; and, on certain rare occasions, during a jihad, for instance, when there are not enough men around to protect the country, women may take up arms “if the imams give a fatwa for it, as the blessed women of Iraq and Chechnya did, with great sadness.” Poor women are also permitted to work for a limited number of hours a day in places like market stalls, as long as their male relatives permit it and they are able to perform their household duties as well.
It follows from these limited expectations that women do not need an excessive amount of education. They merely need be literate and able to do simple arithmetic, in addition to knowing how to knit, sew, and cook. Of course, they also have to know the stories of the Prophet and the rules of sharia, especially those governing women’s lives. The manifesto proposed a simple curriculum for girls between seven and fifteen. “No need for her to flit here and there to get degrees and so on, just so she can try to prove that her intelligence is greater than a man’s.” Bear in mind that “it is considered legitimate for a girl to be married at the age of nine. Most pure girls will be married by sixteen or seventeen, while they are still young and active. Young men will not be more than twenty years old in those glorious generations.”16
What does this mean in practice? That even women who were Sunni and supported Daesh were unable to move freely; they could not go outside without a male relative; their education was strictly limited; they had to wear three veils over their faces and would be lashed if their eyes could be seen; and they would be stoned to death if they were accused of adultery.17
And what is one to make of these girls and young women in the al-Khanssa brigade who policed other women and supervised the sex slaves, girls like Mujahidah Bint Usama, formerly a British medical student, who posted a picture of herself in Raqqa holding a severed head, with the message, “Dream job, a terrorist doc,” followed by smiley faces and hearts?18 Or Aqsa Mahmood, formerly a twenty-year-old pre-med student from Glasgow, who wrote in a blog post on September 11, 2014, “Know this Cameron/Obama, you and your countries will be beneath our feet and your Kufr [unbelief] will be destroyed, this is a promise from Allah swt [abbreviation for ‘glorified and exalted be He’] that we have no doubt over. If not you then your grandchildren or their grandchildren. But worry not, somewhere along the line your blood will be spilled by our cubs in Dawlah [your country]. We have conquered these lands once Beithnillah [God willing] we will do it again. Read up on your History, and know that it will repeat itself, you will pay Jizyah [tax on non-Muslims] to us just like you did in the past. This Islamic Empire shall be known and feared world wide and we will follow none other than the Law of the one and the only ilah [God]!”19
These young Sunni women bought into a sectarian caste system that gave them admission to a society run by an elite group of warriors with life and death power over other women—Yazidis, Shia, Ahmadis, Christians. Their bargain was the same as that made by other women who joined poisonous right-wing groups based on racial identity or religious sect—Nazi women, women of the Hindu Right, or the Ladies Auxiliary of the Ku Klux Klan.
What Does Daesh Believe?
There has been considerable discussion of how Daesh’s version of Islam compares to other, more mainstream practices, and whether religion is actually central to Daesh at all. A controversial piece in The Atlantic by Graeme Wood focused on the way Daesh justified its practices by citing ancient Islamic texts. After interviewing all of three people—a Princeton professor, an Australian recruiter for Daesh, and a London preacher of jihad—Wood decided that Daesh was well within the Muslim tradition. His critics mostly responded by saying Islam-isn’t-like-that.20
In fact, like other fundamentalist organizations, Daesh has cherry-picked ancient texts to justify whatever it wanted to do, then said its own selection was the only correct one. Centuries of interpretation of the texts are considered nothing but corruption and error, unless the interpretations agree with theirs.21 Thus Daesh spokesmen cite scripture and say they are restoring the “true” traditions of the times of the Prophet in order to justify the most appalling acts of cruelty.
While Daesh constantly points to the Koranic foundations of its laws, the last time a lot of those laws were in effect was the seventh century. There have been plenty of Muslim-ruled states since then; some have even said they were based on sharia law, although they were actually following the dictates of realpolitik, like other states. Mouin Rabbani, formerly of the International Crisis Group and now a co-editor of the ezine, Jadaliyya, concluded that “few of the ideas promulgated by the IS are without theological foundation, nor are its practices entirely without precedent. Nevertheless, it can hardly
claim to be rooted in well-established Muslim tradition or jurisprudence and should therefore be primarily understood as a thoroughly modern interpretation and application of a faith whose imagined past is a projection backwards of contemporary agendas rather than a revival of early Islamic rule. The IS’s reclamation of Islam’s essence is thus on a par with the Khmer Rouge’s insistence that it represented the pure soul of communism.”22
Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi, an online researcher of jihadi thought, found the whole “how-Muslim-is-it” debate misguided: “Firstly, the debate is largely between an ‘academic’ view of Islam and the divisions within it, peaceful or otherwise, and a normative view of Islam, which seeks to distance the rigid, conservative, and violent forms of the religion from the one practiced by the vast majority of Muslims around the world. To argue that ISIS isn’t ‘Islamic’ in a normative sense is to argue, to some degree, that Salafism isn’t a branch of Islam and that jihad isn’t a noble concept in the religion, arguments that are false and misleading, and severely hinder attempts to understand these movements properly.”23
Amal Ghazal, an historian, and Larbi Sadiki, a political scientist, are among those who believe it is ridiculous to think that Daesh is either religious or political when clearly it is both. They have argued that its goals are political, it arose out of special social and historical conditions, and religion is central to its self-definition. “Surely, theology is not the main or only drive behind ISIS, but denying its existence denies reality. Regardless of the regional and foreign politics shaping the emergence of ISIS, ISIS defines itself in religious terms, it vies for and fiercely rivals other groups over religiously sanctioned authority, and dutifully and conscientiously anchors itself and its vision in religious texts. ISIS’s worldview, even if cultic, is a religiously-informed one par excellence while at the same time ISIS remains, first and foremost, a political organization with political goals.”24