# Τζιχάντ και ισλάμ



## Costas (Jul 9, 2015)

*Why Tunisia?*
Hugh Eakin / NYRB
July 2, 2015

How can the Arab world’s most promising and ambitious new democracy also be one of its greatest producers of violent jihadists?

For Tunisia, a small North African country with a thousand-year-old tradition of pacifist Islam, a new constitution based on human rights, and a unity government bringing together Islamists and secularists, the question has become a matter of almost existential importance. Despite its unusual political and cultural assets, it has now suffered the two worst terrorist attacks in its history—both involving radicalized young Tunisians, both seeming to target the post-revolutionary order the country has worked so hard to construct.

In Friday’s attack, a young Tunisian man dressed in black entered a beach resort in the coastal town of Sousse with a Kalashnikov and, in about five minutes, systematically killed more than three-dozen people, nearly all of them European vacationers, before being shot dead by security forces. This followed a similarly devastating massacre this spring at the Bardo Museum in Tunis, one of the world’s most important collections of Roman mosaics. On the morning of March 18, three heavily armed young men had rampaged through the museum, taking hostages and killing twenty-two people; again, nearly all of the dead were European tourists. (The target was not arbitrary: the Bardo is adjacent to the national parliament and occupies the historic Ottoman palace in which Tunisia formally became a French Protectorate in 1881.)

Both attacks appear to have been inspired by ISIS. Meanwhile, according to some estimates, Tunisia has sent more fighters to extremist groups abroad—in Libya and Syria but also Algeria and Mali—than any other country.

But why? Like other Arab nations since the uprisings of 2011, Tunisia has been exposed to the sometimes violent conflicts between resurgent Islamism and its opponents. Unlike many of its counterparts, however, the Maghreb republic has shown an ability to bridge these two sides while building a new state grounded in true democratic principles. At the same time, the country can draw on a modernized judiciary, a French-designed education system, and a notably large number of women in professional life. Nor did I find many overt signs of religious tension during my own visit to Tunisia in late May, between the two attacks—to attend a conference at the Bardo on culture in an age of conflict.

Around Tunis’s revered main mosque, one of the oldest in Africa, restaurants avoid serving alcohol, but the streets are filled with shops catering to European tourists, as they have been for decades, and many women go uncovered. In the wealthier northern suburbs, where members of the political and business elite live along pristine stretches of coastline, one is likely to encounter outright antipathy toward religious fundamentalism. Even in a rough working-class neighborhood in south central Tunis, it was hard to find much evidence of new religious strictures, and the people I met invariably reacted with disgust when I asked about the appeal of ISIS.

Indeed, compared to the chaos of Libya and the large-scale crackdowns of Egypt, post-revolution Tunisia has been an oasis of calm. It was here, of course, that the Arab Spring began, and after three successful changes of leadership, the North African republic is the only such nation to have replaced an authoritarian government with a more or less working democracy—and with relatively little bloodshed. It is also unique in the region in pursuing a truth and reconciliation process designed to expose past state abuses.

On top of this, the capital has had an unusual flowering of cultural expression since the revolution, with daring exhibitions and performances that take on sensitive political issues and even religion. At the end of May, I watched thousands of Tunisians line up to see a provocative installation of contemporary art dealing with the many meanings of Islam, featuring work by artists from across the Middle East. Sponsored by the Kamel Lazaar Foundation—the enterprising private foundation that also organized the Bardo conference—it announced itself with a neon sign stating “ALL THE WORLD’S A MOSQUE” and was staged, improbably, in a series of shipping containers next to the site of ancient Carthage. A few days earlier, I met a young gallery owner who recounted the reaction when she recently showed work by a Tunisian cartoonist whose political and religious satires were in some ways even more strident than Charlie Hebdo. “No one gave me any trouble,” she said. 

Yet the Tunisian revolution has had many paradoxical effects. Foremost is the faltering economy. The 2010-2011 uprising against former dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali famously began not among the artists and intellectuals in Tunis, but in the neglected interior, instigated by the country’s poorest inhabitants. By many counts, however, the lot of the poor has hardly improved under the new regime. “This is the problem of the two Tunisias,” Ghazi Gherairi, a legal scholar who has been an adviser on the new constitution, told me.

Who has benefited from the revolution? The political elite and people who already had some means. They got political participation, freedom of expression, freedom of movement, freedom to organize. This was extraordinary. They hit the jackpot. But for the marginalized population who started the revolution—the poor and working classes—they say, “We are poorer than before,” and they are right.

Economic distress has reached the middle class as well. The Ben Ali regime was widely reviled by most Tunisians for its corruption and authoritarianism, but as Kenneth Perkins observes in his History of Modern Tunisia (2014), efforts to promote international trade and tourism had enabled many city dwellers by the early 2000s “to enjoy a standard of living approximating that of areas of southern and eastern Europe.” Today, by contrast, almost every Tunisian I met complained about the cost of living, with soaring housing prices—popularly blamed on the estimated one and a half million Libyans who have sought refuge in Tunisia—and basic foodstuffs going for two or three times what they were before 2011. “What revolution?” one young man named Ayman, who had trained as an engineer but could only find work as a driver, told me. “We’re still waiting for it to happen.”

Add to this the dramatic consequences of setting free a society long held in check by a large-scale police state. Part of what made the Tunisian revolution so remarkable, several local observers told me, was the absence of armed groups vying for power; when Ben Ali fled, the security forces almost immediately withered away, and there was a general consensus among the post-revolutionary political factions that any vestiges of the old security apparatus should be prevented from reemerging.

The powerful Ennahda party, a moderate Islamist party that styled itself after Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party and which led the government from 2011 to 2013, was particularly concerned to end Tunisia’s long tradition of repression of religious parties and organizations. Prisoners of the old regime, including hardened Islamists, were released, and mosques that had previously been tightly controlled by the state and opened only during prayer hours were now left unregulated. And while the rise of Ennahda dominated public debate, the rapid spread of more hardline Salafist groups, some of them funded from abroad, some of them actively preaching jihad, went largely unnoticed.

“The strategy for countering the Salafists was zero. There wasn’t one,” Sheikh Farid Beji, a moderate imam in his mid-forties, told me, when I visited him at his office in Tunis. He blamed the sudden rise of the Salafists after the revolution on “Wahhabi” ideology imported from Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Though some of the Salafists took active part in the new political scene, others were skeptical of the democratic process and hostile to indigenous religious practices they viewed as insufficiently pure. “Already in 2011, I was very afraid that young people”—whom he said are typically offered money and other incentives for joining a jihadist group—“would start to follow them.”

In fact, Salafist groups based in the Arabian peninsula had already been building a base of support in Tunisia in the years before the revolution. “The thing about the previous regime is that it didn’t understand regional threats,” said Oussama Romdhani, a veteran Tunisian journalist and newspaper editor who briefly served as communications minister for the former government. “It assumed all the bad guys were local. And it made a priority of building an advanced Internet and providing near universal access to satellite TV. This was supposed to be a symbol of progress. But it also paved the way for jihadist recruiting and proselytizing.”

Suddenly, in 2012, tensions burst into the open. That spring, thousands of members of the Salafist group Ansar al-Sharia marched in the holy city of Kairouan, southwest of Tunis, waving black jihadist flags and demanding that the government reform the media, education system, and trade unions along Islamist lines; they also harassed university officials and hung jihadist flags from buildings in the center of Tunis and other cities. A few months later, Islamists affiliated with the group attacked the US embassy in Tunis. Meanwhile, some forty Sufi shrines, or marabouts, in Tunis and elsewhere were attacked by extremists, including a particularly venerated one in Sidi Bou Said, which was burned in January 2013. (When I visited it in May, it had been reconstructed.)

After the leader of a secular opposition party, a strident critic of the Islamists, was gunned down in February 2013, the government took steps to rein in Salafist-led mosques, and thousands of would-be jihadists were prevented from leaving the country. Nonetheless, by the time of the killings at the Bardo Museum this spring, there were, according to several analysts I spoke to, an estimated 3,000 to 4,000 Tunisians fighting in Syria and Iraq, and another 1,000 in Libya. (According to Tunisian police, the man who committed last week’s beach massacre had trained at a jihadist camp in Libya.) 

By killing Europeans at the Bardo, the attackers were making a direct assault on the country’s crucial tourism industry, which accounts for up to one in ten Tunisian jobs. One afternoon, I toured the museum galleries with a guard who had been present during the attack. The scars were conspicuous: bullet marks in the stairwells and the tiled walls, ancient statues in glass cases shattered by gunfire. The guard himself had survived the ordeal, and recounted it in horrific detail. But above all were the empty galleries: hardly any visitors at what is normally Tunisia’s most popular site. After the Bardo, many international cruise lines simply cancelled stops in Tunis. And that was before the resort massacre last week.

Still, the government has struggled to provide a security response. Even after the Bardo attack, a new anti-terrorism law proposed by the interior minister remained stalled in parliament. Partly, there have been legitimate fears that preemptive security measures could compromise the values of dignity and human rights that the new constitution has for the first time enshrined. But critics have also accused the Ennahda Party, which has tried to avoid conflict with the Salafists and was badly beaten by the secular Nidaa Tounes party in last fall’s parliamentary elections, of dragging its feet. (Following the attack in Sousse, the current unity government, which includes both parties, pledged to pass the anti-terrorism bill by the end of July.)

Few think that the threat of violence will go away soon. Already in late May, several weeks before the Sousse attack, several Tunisian observers suggested to me that there were likely multiple jihadist cells and that other major sites could be at risk. “We can be certain they will strike again,” Mazen Charif, a security expert who has closely followed the rise of radical groups since the revolution, told me at the time. “We need to help ourselves,” he said. “If the problem is related to Islam, the solution will be with Islam too.”

In the early centuries of Islam, Tunisia was known as a center of religious scholarship and had a prominent part in the development in the Maghreb of Sufism, a tradition that emphasizes interior well-being, self-cultivation, and openness to others. Great Sufi thinkers like Ibn Arabi came to Tunis in the Middle Ages, and even today, after decades of enforced secularism by the former regime, many of Tunisia’s elite identify with the practice. In Sidi Bou Said, a blue-and-white seaside suburb of Tunis, whose cobbled streets are filled with old villas, contemporary art galleries, and traditional textile shops, one man told me, with perhaps only slight exaggeration, that the town was “100 percent Sufi.”

Shortly before his death last fall, the expatriate Tunisian writer and scholar of Islam Abdelwahab Meddeb argued that his country’s deeply embedded religious traditions could be harnessed as a weapon against the new creed of jihad. “Sufism could be the antidote to the illness that plagues Islam today,” he wrote. Others, including Dr. Charif, have cited the example of Morocco, which has given official support to Sufi practices as a counterweight to jihadism.

But such an approach in Tunisia, where religion has increasingly devolved away from the state, faces many obstacles. Sufis tend to reject political Islam and many senior religious scholars seem instinctively wary of becoming involved in national affairs. And many are already alarmed by the numerous attacks on Sufi shrines. As one of the only religious figures in the country who has spoken out strongly against the extremists, Sheikh Beji himself needs a twenty-four-hour armed guard. He has received numerous death threats, he told me. “They say I’m not a Muslim and that I should be killed.”


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## Costas (Aug 17, 2015)

Μετά βίδεου από τη μέρα του δουλοπάζαρου, όπου, εφόσον η 15χρονη είναι γαλανο- ή πρασινομάτα, αξίζει κατιτίς παραπάνω.

ISIS Enshrines a Theology of Rape
Claiming the Quran’s support, the Islamic State codifies sex slavery in conquered regions of Iraq and Syria and uses the practice as a recruiting tool.

Written by RUKMINI CALLIMACHI; Photographs by MAURICIO LIMAAUG. 13, 2015 (NYT)
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/14/w...p-stories-below&WT.nav=top-stories-below&_r=0

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 ISIS-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 ISIS 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.

“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 Dohuk, near Mount 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 some 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.

They would be held in confinement, some for days, some for months. Then, inevitably, they were loaded into the same fleet of buses again before being sent in smaller groups to Syria or to other locations inside Iraq, where they were bought and sold for sex.

“It was 100 percent preplanned,” said Khider Domle, a Yazidi community activist who maintains a detailed database of the victims. “I spoke by telephone to the first family who arrived at the Directory of Youth in Mosul, and the hall was already prepared for them. They had mattresses, plates and utensils, food and water for hundreds of people.”

Detailed reports by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International reach the same conclusion about the organized nature of the sex trade.

In each location, survivors say Islamic State fighters first conducted a census of their female captives.

Inside the voluminous Galaxy banquet hall, F sat on the marble floor, squeezed between other adolescent girls. In all she estimates there were over 1,300 Yazidi girls sitting, crouching, splayed out and leaning against the walls of the ballroom, a number that is confirmed by several other women held in the same location.

They each described how three Islamic State fighters walked in, holding a register. They told the girls to stand. Each one was instructed to state her first, middle and last name, her age, her hometown, whether she was married, and if she had children.

For two months, F was held inside the Galaxy hall. Then one day, they came and began removing young women. Those who refused were dragged out by their hair, she said.

In the parking lot the same fleet of Hajj buses was waiting to take them to their next destination, said F. Along with 24 other girls and young women, the 15-year-old was driven to an army base in Iraq. It was there in the parking lot that she heard the word “sabaya” for the first time.

“They laughed and jeered at us, saying ‘You are our sabaya.’ I didn’t know what that word meant,” she said. Later on, the local Islamic State leader explained it meant slave.

“He told us that Taus Malik” — one of seven angels to whom the Yazidis pray — “is not God. He said that Taus Malik is the devil and that because you worship the devil, you belong to us. We can sell you and use you as we see fit.”

The Islamic State’s sex trade appears to be based solely on enslaving women and girls from the Yazidi minority. As yet, there has been no widespread campaign aimed at enslaving women from other religious minorities, said Samer Muscati, the author of the recent Human Rights Watch report. That assertion was echoed by community leaders, government officials and other human rights workers.

Mr. Barber, of the University of Chicago, said that the focus on Yazidis was likely because they are seen as polytheists, with an oral tradition rather than a written scripture. In the Islamic State’s eyes that puts them on the fringe of despised unbelievers, even more than Christians and Jews, who are considered to have some limited protections under the Quran as “People of the Book.”

In Kojo, one of the southernmost villages on Mount Sinjar and among the farthest away from escape, residents decided to stay, believing they would be treated as the Christians of Mosul had months earlier. On Aug. 15, 2014, the Islamic State ordered the residents to report to a school in the center of town.

When she got there, 40-year-old Aishan Ali Saleh found a community elder negotiating with the Islamic State, asking if they could be allowed to hand over their money and gold in return for safe passage.

The fighters initially agreed and laid out a blanket, where Ms. Saleh placed her heart-shaped pendant and her gold rings, while the men left crumpled bills.

Instead of letting them go, the fighters began shoving the men outside, bound for death.

Sometime later, a fleet of cars arrived and the women, girls and children were driven away.
The Market

Months later, the Islamic State made clear in their online magazine that their campaign of enslaving Yazidi women and girls had been extensively preplanned.

“Prior to the taking of Sinjar, Shariah students in the Islamic State were tasked to research the Yazidis,” said the English-language article, headlined “The Revival of Slavery Before the Hour,” which appeared in the October issue of Dabiq.

The article made clear that for the Yazidis, there was no chance to pay a tax known as jizya to be set free, “unlike the Jews and Christians.”

“After capture, the Yazidi women and children were then divided according to the Shariah amongst the fighters of the Islamic State who participated in the Sinjar operations, after one fifth of the slaves were transferred to the Islamic State’s authority to be divided” as spoils, the article said.

In much the same way as specific Bible passages were used centuries later to support the slave trade in the United States, the Islamic State cites specific verses or stories in the Quran or else in the Sunna, the traditions based on the sayings and deeds of the Prophet Muhammad, to justify their human trafficking, experts say.

Scholars of Islamic theology disagree, however, on the proper interpretation of these verses, and on the divisive question of whether Islam actually sanctions slavery.

Many argue that slavery figures in Islamic scripture in much the same way that it figures in the Bible — as a reflection of the period in antiquity in which the religion was born.

“In the milieu in which the Quran arose, there was a widespread practice of men having sexual relationships with unfree women,” said Kecia Ali, an associate professor of religion at Boston University and the author of a book on slavery in early Islam. “It wasn’t a particular religious institution. It was just how people did things.”

Cole Bunzel, a scholar of Islamic theology at Princeton University, disagrees, pointing to the numerous references to the phrase “Those your right hand possesses” in the Quran, which for centuries has been interpreted to mean female slaves. He also points to the corpus of Islamic jurisprudence, which continues into the modern era and which he says includes detailed rules for the treatment of slaves.

“There is a great deal of scripture that sanctions slavery,” said Mr. Bunzel, the author of a research paper published by the Brookings Institution on the ideology of the Islamic State. “You can argue that it is no longer relevant and has fallen into abeyance. ISIS would argue that these institutions need to be revived, because that is what the Prophet and his companions did.”

The youngest, prettiest women and girls were bought in the first weeks after their capture. Others — especially older, married women — described how they were transported from location to location, spending months in the equivalent of human holding pens, until a prospective buyer bid on them.

Their captors appeared to have a system in place, replete with its own methodology of inventorying the women, as well as their own lexicon. Women and girls were referred to as “Sabaya,” followed by their name. Some were bought by wholesalers, who photographed and gave them numbers, to advertise them to potential buyers.

Osman Hassan Ali, a Yazidi businessman who has successfully smuggled out numerous Yazidi women, said he posed as a buyer in order to be sent the photographs. He shared a dozen images, each one showing a Yazidi woman sitting in a bare room on a couch, facing the camera with a blank, unsmiling expression. On the edge of the photograph is written in Arabic, “Sabaya No. 1,” “Sabaya No. 2,” and so on.

Buildings where the women were collected and held sometimes included a viewing room.

“When they put us in the building, they said we had arrived at the ‘Sabaya Market,’” said one 19-year-old victim, whose first initial is I. “I understood we were now in a slave market.”

She estimated there were at least 500 other unmarried women and girls in the multistory building, with the youngest among them being 11. When the buyers arrived, the girls were taken one by one into a separate room.

“The emirs sat against the wall and called us by name. We had to sit in a chair facing them. You had to look at them, and before you went in, they took away our scarves and anything we could have used to cover ourselves,” she said.

“When it was my turn, they made me stand four times. They made me turn around.”

The captives were also forced to answer intimate questions, including reporting the exact date of their last menstrual cycle. They realized that the fighters were trying to determine whether they were pregnant, in keeping with a Shariah rule stating that a man cannot have intercourse with his slave if she is pregnant.
Property of ISIS

The use of sex slavery by the Islamic State initially surprised even the group’s most ardent supporters, many of whom sparred with journalists online after the first reports of systematic rape.

The Islamic State’s leadership has repeatedly sought to justify the practice to its internal audience.

After the initial article in Dabiq in October, the issue came up in the publication again this year, in an editorial in May that expressed the writer’s hurt and dismay at the fact that some of the group’s own sympathizers had questioned the institution of slavery.

“What really alarmed me was that some of the Islamic State’s supporters started denying the matter as if the soldiers of the Khilafah had committed a mistake or evil,” the author wrote. “I write this while the letters drip of pride,’’ she said. “We have indeed raided and captured the kafirahwomen and drove them like sheep by the edge of the sword.” Kafirah refers to infidels.

In a pamphlet published online in December, the Research and Fatwa Department of the Islamic State detailed best practices, including explaining that slaves belong to the estate of the fighter who bought them and therefore can be willed to another man and disposed of just like any other property after his death.

Recent escapees describe an intricate bureaucracy surrounding their captivity, with their status as a slave registered in a contract. When their owner would sell them to another buyer, a new contract would be drafted, like transferring a property deed. At the same time, slaves can also be set free, and fighters are promised a heavenly reward for doing so.

Though rare, this has created one avenue of escape for victims.

A 25-year-old victim who escaped last month, identified by her first initial, A, described how one day her Libyan master handed her a laminated piece of paper. He explained that he had finished his training as a suicide bomber and was planning to blow himself up, and was therefore setting her free.

Labeled a “Certificate of Emancipation,” the document was signed by the judge of the western province of the Islamic State. The Yazidi woman presented it at security checkpoints as she left Syria to return to Iraq, where she rejoined her family in July.

The Islamic State recently made it clear that sex with Christian and Jewish women captured in battle is also permissible, according to a new 34-page manual issued this summer by the terror group’s Research and Fatwa Department.

Just about the only prohibition is having sex with a pregnant slave, and the manual describes how an owner must wait for a female captive to have her menstruating cycle, in order to “make sure there is nothing in her womb,” before having intercourse with her. Of the 21 women and girls interviewed for this article, among the only ones who had not been raped were the women who were already pregnant at the moment of their capture, as well as those who were past menopause.

Beyond that, there appears to be no bounds to what is sexually permissible. Child rape is explicitly condoned: “It is permissible to have intercourse with the female slave who hasn’t reached puberty, if she is fit for intercourse,” according to a translation by the Middle East Media Research Institute of a pamphlet published on Twitter last December.

One 34-year-old Yazidi woman, who was bought and repeatedly raped by a Saudi fighter in the Syrian city of Shadadi, described how she fared better than the second slave in the household — a 12-year-old girl who was raped for days on end despite heavy bleeding.

“He destroyed her body. She was badly infected. The fighter kept coming and asking me, ‘Why does she smell so bad?’ And I said, she has an infection on the inside, you need to take care of her,” the woman said.

Unmoved, he ignored the girl’s agony, continuing the ritual of praying before and after raping the child.

“I said to him, ‘She’s just a little girl,’ ” the older woman recalled. “And he answered: ‘No. She’s not a little girl. She’s a slave. And she knows exactly how to have sex.’ ’’

“And having sex with her pleases God,” he said.


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## SBE (Aug 18, 2015)

Πώς είπαμε ότι γίνεσαι μουσουλμάνος, για να ξέρουμε για καλό και για κακό;


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## Earion (Aug 18, 2015)

Είπαμε:



Earion said:


> Σηκώνεις ψηλά το δείκτη του δεξιού σου χεριού και λες αργά, δυνατά και καθαρά:
> *Λα ιλλάχα ιλλά Αλλάχ, Μουχάμμαντ ρασούλ-ου-’λλάχ*
> (La Ilaha Illa Allah, Muhammad Rasulu Allah).
> 
> Μετά βέβαια πρέπει να κάνεις περιτομή...


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## SBE (Aug 18, 2015)

Εντάξει, για τις γυναίκες δεν ισχύει η περιτομή. 
Βέβαια και με αυτά δεν τη γλυτώνεις, μάλλον. Μπορεί να γλυτώσεις το σκλαβοπάζαρο, αλλά μπορεί να αρέσεις σε κανέναν τζιχαντιστή και να θέλει να σε παντρευτεί δόξη και τιμή.


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