In recent months the public have been increasingly exposed to reports of the brutal tactics used by Islamic State in carrying out barbaric executions and inducing terror.
Beheadings are now commonplace and each new atrocity they commit and publicise manages to take the depravity of their movement to new levels. But the women and young girls that are taken captive by IS face a different sort of torture, not given the same public profile by their captors.
Organised rape
‘ISIS forces have committed organised rape, sexual assault and other horrific crimes against Yazidi women and girls’, said Liesl Gerntholtz, women’s rights director at Human Rights Watch in a report published on 15 April, and ‘those fortunate enough to have escaped need to be treated for the unimaginable trauma they endured’.
The report also stated that out of 20 women and girls they interviewed who had escaped IS, half, including two 12-year-old girls, said they had been raped, some many times and by several IS soldiers. Nearly all said they had been forced into marriage, sold or given as ‘gifts’.
A report published by the UN Security Council in March stated that IS had established a pattern of sexual violence, slavery, abduction and human trafficking. They reported cases of forced abortion performed because of the ethnicity of the victim. Most victims were aged between eight and 35 years old.
Ala Lattif, of the new Iraqi Kurdish women’s magazine Zhin, spoke with girls who escaped the captivity of IS, publishing an emotive article in which she tells of how two sisters held captive shaved off their eyebrows and put grease and soil on their faces in an attempt to appear dirty and unappealing to avoid being raped. Their attempts were unsuccessful.
She also described an interview with a 13-year-old girl who managed to escape. She described how this Yazidi girl avoided eye contact when asked whether she was physically assaulted. The girl stated that she was kept in a room with lots of other girls who were routinely taken for a couple of hours at a time and how some were sold, and her hands shook as she talked about them while claiming to be the only one that was not touched.
A hospital psychologist in Iraqi Kurdistan, Freeshta Kawa, describes how the women suffer repercussions from their assaults, and that they have difficulties in being accepted back into their families: ‘There is nothing we can do for the women psychologically, since most of them remain silent.’
Women’s needs
A Brighton mother of two is calling for people across the UK to donate and collect ‘care packs’ through their communities for women and girls, pregnant women, new mothers and other vulnerable groups. In the last six months she has sent more than ten lorries of aid to Northern Iraq with the help of hundreds of individuals and churches across the UK. ‘Local partners have advised me that humanitarian organisations are largely focused on trying to provide food and other essential non-food items, and that women’s needs are often overlooked’, says Samara Levy.
Message of love
‘We want to send a message of love and encouragement from the UK and to let these women know that we care. After the traumatic ordeals that many of them have been through, they now face a very bleak future. We are keen to send some of the basic items that these women will want and need but be unable to buy, to restore some dignity.’
