ISIS Atrocities against the Yezidis

The ISIS genocide of the Yezidis will have implications for generations to come.⁷ While under ISIS control, Yezidi children witnessed unspeakable horrors and suffered physical abuse, humiliation, and radical indoctrination. The range of atrocities is staggering. According to the New York Times:

Kidnapped boys were routinely forced to become fighters, while women and girls were tortured and sold as sex slaves. Systematic rape of women was part of the group’s plan; some were raped for weeks and others for years. Girls as young as 8, perhaps younger, were raped. On an online marketplace popular with ISIS, one man offered to trade a pair of Adidas shoes for a Yazidi girl. Yazidi boys also reported being sexually abused by ISIS men.⁸

Under ISIS, Yezidi children were forced into domestic servitude, conscripted into militant activities (child recruits were called “Cubs of the Caliphate”),⁹ and forced to engage in tasks that constitute modern-day slavery. The United Nations defined child slavery, reaffirming the Slavery Convention of 1926, as including bondage, serfdom, and child marriage. A slave is a person over whom rights of ownership are exercised, and the “slave trade” encompasses the capture, acquisition, and trade of persons with a view to selling or exchanging them.¹⁰

ISIS barbarism varied depending on the age, gender, and country of origin of the slave owner. Yezidi girls experienced atrocities unlike the boys did.¹¹ Young girls were sexually abused; some were “sold for weapons, or for just $10, or [as little as] 10 cigarettes,” according to an NBC News report.¹² While some girls became domestic servants, the majority were trafficked for sex. According to the US State Department: “When a child (under 18 years of age) is recruited, enticed, harbored, transported, provided, obtained, patronized, solicited, or maintained to perform a commercial sex act … the offense [should be] prosecuted as human trafficking. There are no exceptions to this rule: no cultural or socioeconomic rationalizations alter the fact that children who are exploited in prostitution are trafficking victims.”¹³

Yezidi girls were not deployed as suicide bombers like the boys were.¹⁴ Depending on their age at time of capture, boys seven to twelve were trained to become fighters, suicide bombers, car bombers, or guerrilla fighters (called inghemasi by ISIS).¹⁵ From survivor (and perpetrator) testimonies, we know that some foreign fighters treated the Yezidi children like adopted children or took them in as servants for their household. The Yezidi children performed menial tasks or scavenged for food as ISIS began losing control over its territorial caliphate.

Over the five years from the capture of Sinjar in 2014 to the fall of ISIS in 2019, the majority of Yezidi children suffered physical and mental torture. All the children experienced family separation, and many were forced to watch the killing of their brothers, fathers, and uncles before their very eyes. Upon repatriation and return to their families, the children were traumatized—necessitating medical treatment and psychosocial intervention. Amnesty International released a report titled “Legacy of Terror: The Plight of Yezidi Child Survivors of ISIS,” which documented ISIS abuses. The report summarized the range of atrocities children suffered:

[Children were] starved, tortured or forced to endure or participate in hostilities… . While some children return with treatable conditions such as anaemia or scabies, others have debilitating, long-term injuries, illnesses or conditions. As a result of their involvement in fighting, boys who were forcibly recruited by [ISIS] are especially likely to suffer from serious health conditions and physical impairments, such as lost [limbs]… . [Female] survivors of rape and other sexual violence suffer unique health issues, including traumatic fistulas; scarring; and difficulties conceiving, during pregnancy or giving birth to a child.¹⁶

From firsthand accounts and biographies of survivors, we can reconstruct what happened to the women and girls from the moment they were abducted to provide readers with a glimpse of what they experienced.

Women queued up as they exited the caravans of dusty Toyota trucks or were herded aboard buses and cars flying the black-and-white banners of ISIS. The girls looked haggard, thin, and frail after their journey from Mount Sinjar. They were exhausted from lack of sleep and dehydrated from lack of water, or they were sick from drinking brackish water from dirty wells in the villages that dotted the route between Sinjar and their final destination—the slave markets in Raqqa, Syria, or Mosul, Iraq. Along the way, girls were jam-packed into flophouses—as many as 150 to a residence. Most of these ramshackle “homes” lacked ventilation, clean water, or indoor plumbing. Rarely given food for days on end, the girls were on the verge of starvation. When they were fed, they were given inedible scraps, or they ate weevil-infested biscuits from sheer desperation.

The girls had been locked in darkened vans or basements for so long that the midday sun was blinding as they exited the vehicles. They covered their faces to shield their eyes from the light, as burly foreign women barked orders in British-inflected pidgin Arabic: mashi mashi (go on, go). One of the so-called jihadi brides who were in charge rounded up the girls for the slave traders. These women were immune to the girls’ cries for help. They appeared to lack empathy and did nothing to protect or help the girls. If anything, the foreign women facilitated the men’s access to the girls or helped set up brothels where ISIS profited financially from the sex slaves they could not sell at market.

In 2015 the Foreign Affairs Committee of the US House of Representatives reported: “This violence [committed by ISIS] against women is almost without parallel, from widespread rape and trafficking to forced marriage and murder. Female captives, including thousands of Yazidi women and girls, are sold as slaves in modern day slave markets.”¹⁷

Female Accomplices

In many ways, ISIS was no different from any other jihadi terrorist group when it came to its mistreatment of women. It was fundamentally misogynistic. Like other jihadi organizations, it saw the role of women as “divinely” limited. What made ISIS different, however, was its unmatched efforts at luring female supporters to travel to Syria, attracting fresh candidates for marriage with promises of empowerment, altruism, and piety. Despite what propagandists disseminated on social media, women were first and foremost commodities to be bought, sold, and traded at the whim of men. ISIS manipulated and distorted its message to lure women in much the same way sexual predators do when they seek victims online, by grooming.

ISIS turned the women against one another and effectively brainwashed scores of foreign girls into leaving the comfort of their homes and traveling thousands of miles to serve the Islamic State. ISIS offered these girls the prospect of an exciting life and used other women as intermediaries to carry out their barbarism. There was no feminist sisterhood; women were not protective of other women and displayed no sympathetic feelings for the Yezidi captives they oversaw or the girls they helped traffic from abroad.

Some ISIS wives helped the men recruit (and lure) girls whose defenses would have been lowered when chatting online with women as opposed to strange men. Other ISIS women helped traffic Yezidi sex slaves and children. These women not only engaged in human trafficking but also facilitated the physical and sexual abuse of Yezidi slaves.

Having left her native Elkhart, Indiana to join ISIS in Syria, Samantha Sally encouraged her husband, Moussa Elhassani, to purchase several Yezidi girls at the slave market but justified the acquisition by convincing herself that she was “saving” them. She admitted to BBC journalist Joshua Baker that she also felt lonely and isolated although she has never expressed remorse for the part she played in human trafficking and genocide.¹⁸ Even after striking a plea deal with the US government for materially supporting a terrorist organization, Sally never admitted culpability in aiding and abetting the sexual abuse of minors. She had a hard time acknowledging that she had been a party to genocide, which includes taking children of one ethnicity to be raised as another, as she did with a Yezidi boy named Aham who was brought into her household. As for the Yezidi slave girls who lived in her home in Raqqa, Sally told Jessica Roy of Elle magazine: “I would never apologize for bringing those girls to my house… . We knew that if we were just patient we would stick together. You understand? We cooked together, we cleaned together. Drank coffee together. Slept in the same room together. I was like their mother.”¹⁹

Sally recounted to CNN’s Nick Paton Walsh: “When I met Soad, I couldn’t think about money, I needed to help her.” Soad, the teenage girl, cost Sally $10,000, which was half the money Sally had smuggled with her from the United States. Sally brought Soad home, and Moussa started raping her soon after.²⁰ Sally let Moussa rape Bedrine, a fourteen-year-old Yezidi sabaya (sex slave), as well as fifteen-year-old Soad. She did nothing to prevent this abuse under her roof.²¹ In the podcast I’m Not a Monster, Sally told Joshua Baker, that it “broke her heart” each time she went upstairs to tell one of the Yezidi girls that it was “ ‘their turn, to take a shower,’ and get them ready for Moussa.”²²

Paton Walsh asked her whether she regretted having enabled serial rape.²³ Again she justified her actions: “No one will ever be able to imagine what it is like to watch their husband rape a 14-year-old girl. Ever. And then she comes to you—me—after crying and I hold her and tell her it’s going to be okay. Everything is going to be fine, just be patient.”²⁴

Back at the selection, Yezidi girls like Soad and Bedrine were processed like chattel. They were terrified and could not possibly understand the fate that awaited them. The youngest girls grasped tightly onto their sisters’ or mother’s hands and cried and cried. They had witnessed their fathers and brothers murdered in front of them. As ISIS divided the Yezidis, separating male from female and old from young, many of the family matriarchs were taken away and the teenagers became responsible for their younger siblings. Like Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games, sometimes an older sibling would make the ultimate sacrifice to protect her younger sister. One nine-year-old insisted, “Take me [instead] to be raped, but not my little sister, please don’t touch her, take me.” So ISIS let the six-year-old go down the mountain, but they raped the “older” nine-year-old girl instead.²⁵

A Case for Charging ISIS with Genocide

“In the summer of 2014,” according to “Bearing Witness,” a report from the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, the “Islamic State carried out a violent campaign against civilians in Ninewa province in northern Iraq, home to many of Iraq’s ethnic and religious minorities.” The report found that ISIS fighters sought to “control, expel, and exterminate ethnic and religious minorities in areas it seized and sought to hold. [ISIS] committed crimes against humanity, war crimes, and ethnic cleansing against the aforementioned communities in Ninewa … [and] genocide against the Yezidi people.”²⁶ The ethnic cleansing campaign was intentional. ISIS concocted religious justification ex post facto for its atrocities, but the fact was that the promise of an unlimited supply of sex slaves enabled ISIS to recruit foreign fighters from around the world. The Counter Extremism Project reported in 2020 that “[ISIS’] campaign was a carefully orchestrated, pre-planned, and systematic attempt to destroy a minority community, through mass executions of men of fighting age and the mass kidnapping and trafficking of Yazidi women and children into slavery as the ‘spoils of war’ … in a textbook campaign of ethnic cleansing.”²⁷

An Independent International Commission of Inquiry by the United Nations Human Rights Council investigated violations committed against the Yezidis and documented that they had been subjected to mass killings, rape, sexual violence, enslavement, torture, and forcible transfer. In May 2021 the UN concluded that not only had ISIS committed genocide but also it had used chemical weapons (specifically mustard gas) in direct violation of international law. ISIS perpetrated mass killings of thousands of civilians. “[It sought] to destroy the Yazidi, physically and biologically,” and mandated that the minority group “convert or die.”²⁸ The UN modified its language from “acts of genocide” in 2015 to declaring that ISIS had committed genocide and used chemical weapons by 2021.²⁹ Yezidi men were lined up and executed in front of open pits that served as mass graves.³⁰ Boys aged seven to fifteen were taken to training camps for indoctrination. Scores of these Yezidi children were weaponized and deployed as suicide bombers, although since many remain missing we do not have exact figures for how many.

This was not the first time that Yezidis were targeted for ethnic cleansing. In the early 2000s, Al Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi galvanized Sunni support for an extreme Salafi interpretation of Islam that vilified the Yezidis and justified their being repeatedly attacked. In 2007 jihadis used four truck bombs that killed three hundred, wounded seven hundred, and destroyed four hundred homes in Sinjar.³¹ In August 2009, two Al Qaeda in Iraq suicide bombers attacked a café in Sinjar City, killing twenty-one and wounding thirty-two more. In October 2013, as ISIS metastasized in Iraq and Syria, Yezidi students at Mosul University received threats of death unless they left. One thousand students postponed their studies to avoid being killed.³²

Although ISIS rationalized its campaign by arguing that it was upholding its principles of monotheism, according to the NGO Doctors without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières, the goal was extermination.³³ Amnesty International found that ISIS “tortured, forced to fight, raped and subjected [children] to other egregious human rights violations.”³⁴ Article 2 of the December 1948 UN Genocide Convention states that forcibly transferring children of one ethnic group to another constitutes an act of genocide, yet another atrocity ISIS was committing against the Yezidi population.³⁵

Mara Revkin and Elisabeth Wood, researchers from Duke and Yale Universities, write that ISIS treated the Yezidis differently from other groups, including those for which they expressed antipathy. According to Revkin and Wood, during the years when ISIS controlled eastern Syria and northern Iraq (2014–2017), the group deployed tactics against the Yezidis that it avoided using against others, such as Alawites, Shi’a, Christians, and Sunni women connected to rival groups.³⁶ While Revkin and Wood argued that ISIS was motivated by ideology more than strategy, Naomi Kikoler has argued the reverse, writing that ISIS perpetrated atrocities “strategically and tactically to advance a range of interests, including to generate new recruits (especially foreign fighters), to secure income, enslave women, force civilians from population centers to ease their administration, and maintain order in [its] territory.”³⁷

Amnesty International acknowledged that although Yezidis were specifically targeted, ISIS committed grave human rights violations and war crimes against many other communities, including Assyrian Christians, Turkmen Shi’a, Shabak Shi’a, Kakai, and Sabean-Mandaeans.³⁸

Although the violation was not included in the original 1948 Genocide Convention, its author, Raphael Lemkin, likewise considered that the destruction of culture constituted a form of genocide (from which Indigenous communities in North America, Australia, and Africa also suffered). Lemkin wrote: “The world represents only so much culture and intellectual vigor as are created by its component national groups. Essentially the idea of a nation [is] based upon genuine traditions, genuine culture, and well-developed national psychology. The destruction of a nation, therefore, results in the loss of its future contribution to the world.”³⁹

In addition to ethnically cleansing the Yezidi community, massacring the men, conducting a campaign of sexual violence against women, and transferring young children to Sunni families, ISIS sought to destroy Yezidi religious, spiritual, and cultural sites. ISIS demolished temples throughout Sinjar and Bashiqa-Bahzani. In total, ISIS destroyed sixty-eight Yezidi temples, shrines, and cultural sites. The German government called the 2014 massacre a genocide, condemning “indescribable atrocities” and “tyrannical injustice” carried out by ISIS fighters “with the intention of completely wiping out the Yazidi community.”⁴⁰ U.N. Investigators agreed, declaring the “2014 ISIS Offensive against Yazidis an Act of Genocide.”⁴¹

ISIS Brainwashing

ISIS not only kidnapped Yezidi children but also trained them to carry out terrorist attacks. Two young brothers, Abu Khattab al-Sinjari and Abu Yussuf al-Sinjari, snatched in 2014, were featured in several propaganda videos. The boys made a “last will and testament” video in 2016 before being deployed as suicide bombers. Abu Khattab’s mission occurred on December 12, 2016, after which, ISIS “eulogized him” on its official Dabiq channels. His older brother was filmed using a drone to detonate a vehicle-based IED, and the footage was used in an ISIS video released on February 14, 2017. In their martyrdom video they stated that before becoming Cubs of the Caliphate, they had been heretics and were going to hell. Then, as if they had memorized the words by rote, they said: “When we were in Sinjar, we worshipped the devil and we were without God.… We were ignorant and not aware of concepts such as halal and haram.”⁴² Becoming martyrs for ISIS was their only salvation. After the release of the video, the boys were identified by their real names as eleven- and twelve-year-old Amjad and Asaad Alyas-Mahjo.⁴³ While the Yezidi boys were deployed as suicide bombers, the girls faced a fate worse than death.

Between August and September 2014, ISIS kidnapped thousands of Yezidi children. They also kidnapped four hundred children from Anbar province who were not Yezidi.⁴⁴ Almost all were forcibly converted to Islam, taught to speak Arabic, and banned from speaking their native Kurdish tongue. Like the Nigerian girls kidnapped by Boko Haram, Yezidi girls were offered the choice between death and conversion. ISIS members reportedly told them, “ ‘We won’t do anything bad to you, if you convert to Islam.’ Some feared for their life and converted. Many refused.”⁴⁵ Thousands of Yezidi children were starved, tortured, and some of the boys were forced to fight on the front lines as suicide bombers. Those who survived their ordeal were left with long-term injuries, lost limbs, and even bullets lodged in their bodies.⁴⁶ Amnesty International interviewed a Yezidi survivor named Sahir who described how he was beaten with cables and plastic pipe, starved, and coerced to fight for the Islamic State.⁴⁷ An article in the New York Times Magazine noted: “To train a child to kill, ISIS began with small acts of aggression. The boys would get a slap from an ISIS fighter—one of the trainers— and then be told to kick another boy. ‘To be hurt, and to hurt,’ [explained Jan Kizilhan, a psychology professor and trauma expert]. ‘It can be taught, and with time you lose your feeling of empathy.’… Violence becomes a mode of being a way to solve problems.”⁴⁸

According to a study of 1,992 children who survived forced conscription, rape, and other abuses during their 2014–2017 captivity, their experiences caused a multitude of negative psychological outcomes.⁴⁹ The captured Yezidi children were subjected to coercive persuasion, what might be called colloquially “brainwashing,” in which the children were required to erase all knowledge of their previous selves. This psychological approach begins by breaking down the self, desensitizing the child to all forms of violence (committed in front of their eyes or by their own hands), and replacing the sense of self with a new identity. Sahir explained the process:

They were trying to convert us totally, and to get us to forget where we came from, our history, our background, to be 100% converted. They were also working on our bodies [to be strong]… . The first thing they taught us was how to use the gun—how to open it, how to shoot, how to hold it. And I was trained on rashash (machine gun), the RPGs (rocket-propelled grenades), sniper shooting. I was trained on all of (the weapons)… . I was forced to fight. I had to do it or die. I didn’t have any other option. It was out of my control.⁵⁰

This desensitization to violence has long-term implications for the psychological well-being of children and their ability to reintegrate into a post-conflict setting. One Yezidi survivor who was taken from Iraq to Syria described his experience: “They told us we had to become good Muslims and fight for Islam. They showed us videos of beheadings, killing and Islamic State battles. [My instructor] said: ‘You have to kill kuffars even if they are your fathers and brothers, because they belong to the wrong religion and they don’t worship God.’ ”⁵¹

Reestablishing the Antiquated Institution of Slavery

Even though slavery (ebudiyah) is recognized as unjust in the Qur’an and is illegal in most of the Middle East, the Islamic State clerics decided that slave ownership was religiously sanctioned, revived the practice, and in doing so, routinized sexual violence in the caliphate and among its affiliates in West Africa and Southeast Asia—even though most countries in the region had banned slavery since the nineteenth century. The vast majority of Sunni jurisprudence unambiguously rejects ISIS’s revival of sexual slavery and concubinage.⁵² The archaic institution of slavery should have been relegated to the ash heap of history, but ISIS reinterpreted Islamic law, expropriated the conquered women’s bodies, and decided that concubines were legitimate spoils of war. ISIS religious leaders, referencing laws from the sixth century, insisted in their propaganda that the master was “the legal owner of a slave’s labor and was entitled to his or her sexual submission.”⁵³

After the capture of Mount Sinjar, ISIS published a pamphlet, which it distributed in December 2014, titled “Questions and Answers on Female Slaves and Their Freedom.”⁵⁴ The pamphlet detailed ISIS’s rules and regulations regarding intercourse with female slaves—drawing justification from Qur’anic verses and ahadith. Numerous contemporary Islamic theologians assert that the guidelines contravene even the most outdated principles of jurisprudence.⁵⁵

ISIS disseminated the pamphlet throughout its territory and online legitimating sexual slavery, including sex with children as young as six. The pamphlet claimed that it was permissible to buy, sell, or gift female captives as property of the victors and stated that if a female slave was a virgin, her owner could “enjoy” her (meaning rape) as soon as the terms of ownership were satisfied. If the woman was not a virgin, her owner had to wait for her uterus to be purified—that is, for menstruation to begin and end—before engaging in intercourse, ostensibly to ensure that the woman was not pregnant. The pamphlet made relations with prepubescent girls legitimate, rationalizing, “It is permissible to have intercourse with a female slave who hasn’t reached puberty if she is ‘fit for intercourse.’ ”⁵⁶

Theological and political discussions on the permissibility or desirability of sexual slavery are abundant in ISIS’s English-language propaganda. The ninth issue of the ISIS propaganda magazine Dabiq included a quote from Surat al-Baqarah 2:221 about marrying slave girls or nonbelievers: “He [subhānah] said, inciting his believing servants to marry female slaves (if they cannot afford to marry free women) and preferring them to a free mushrikah (nonbeliever) of noble lineage. And [that] a believing slave-girl is better than a mushrikah, even though she might please you.”⁵⁷ In the same issue, ISIS propagandists argued that taking married women as slaves was also allowed: “The right hand’s possession [mulk al-yamīn] are [sic] the female captives who were separated from their husbands by enslavement. They became lawful for the one who ends up possessing them even without pronouncement of divorce by their [harbī] husbands.… Ibn ‘Abbās said, ‘Approaching any married woman is fornication, except for the woman who has been enslaved’ [Al-Hākim said, ‘It is an authentic hadīth according to the criteria of al-Bukhārī and Muslim’].”⁵⁸

The overwhelming majority of Sunni Muslims across the four schools of Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh), and including Salafists, railed against ISIS’s endorsement of sexual slavery. The regulations governing female slaves established in the ninth century set certain limitations on behavior. For example, a slave who functions as a maid could not be a sex slave. In this case she serves her owner, but he is prohibited from having intimate contact. Alternatively, if a master decides to marry his slave, then the master is the only one permitted to have a physical relationship with her.⁵⁹ In the fifteenth issue of Dabiq, ISIS appeared to respond to allegations that it had been subverting Islamic conventions regarding reinstituting slave ownership: “After all this, saby (female slaves) becomes fornication and tasarrī (taking a slave-girl as a concubine) becomes rape? If only we’d heard these falsehoods from the kuffār who are ignorant of our religion. Instead, we hear it from those associated with our Ummah, those whose names are Muhammad, Ibrāhīm, and ‘Alī!”⁶⁰

One nine-year-old Yezidi girl told an aid worker that she had been assaulted by ten ISIS fighters and became pregnant as a result. She recounted that most of her abusers were soldiers or men who had been selected for a suicide bombing mission and were gifted sex with very young girls as their final reward before going into battle or carrying out their martyrdom operation.⁶¹

In their propaganda magazine, Dabiq, ISIS linked the history of capturing slaves during war to the tradition and Sunnah of the Prophet Muhammad:

Saby (taking slaves through war) is in the great prophetic Sunnah containing many divine wisdoms and religious benefits, regardless of whether or not the people are aware of this. The Prophet’s (sallallāhu ‘alayhi wa sallam) raiding of the kuffār would kill the men and enslave the children and women. The raids of the beloved Prophet (sallallāhu ‘alayhi wa sallam) convey this to us. Ask the tribes of Banī al-Mustaliq, Banī Quraydhah, and Hawāzin about this.… The Sahābah and their followers treaded upon the path of the Prophet (sallallāhu ‘alayhi wa sallam). Therefore, we cannot find a companion who didn’t practice saby. ‘Alī Ibn AbīTālib had nineteen slave-girls.⁶²

Zainab Bangura, the former head of the United Nations team investigating sex crimes in war zones, explained that ISIS fighters did not just brutalize women and girls after seizing their villages but integrated the women into a system of commoditization. She described the process:

After attacking a village, [ISIS] splits women from men and executes boys and men aged 14 and over. The women and mothers are separated; girls are stripped naked, tested for virginity and examined for breast size and prettiness. The youngest, and those considered the prettiest virgins fetch higher prices [at slave markets] and are sent to Raqqa… . Sheikhs get first choice, then emirs [princes], then fighters. They often take three or four girls each and keep them for a month or so, until they grow tired of a girl, when she goes back to market.⁶³

In the slave market in Raqqa, camouflage-clad fighters would leer at the girls, snickering at their young age. Twenty-year-old Tunisian and Moroccan foreign fighters were transfixed by the Yezidi girls who often had blue or green eyes—and were considered more exotic by regional standards of beauty since they appeared more Caucasian. In many Middle Eastern countries, light-skinned women fetch a higher bride price and are considered more valuable, constituting a mark of success and wealth.⁶⁴ The slave traders scrutinized each girl, evaluating her appearance. Worse still, ISIS women examined the girls physically to determine their virginity. To ascertain her “purity,” the women used long feathers to test whether a girl’s hymen was intact. Those who were under twelve were assumed to be bint, or virgins, and fetched a higher price at the slave market than older girls whose chastity was in question. Both men and women manhandled the Yezidi girls, pushing and shoving them. Beaten, starved, humiliated, and defenseless, some of the girls still managed to resist, refusing to bathe in the hope that the stench from their unwashed bodies would repulse the men. The tactic did not work.

Some of the older girls (those who were sixteen or over) pretended they were already married and pregnant, since it was forbidden for ISIS fighters to rape a pregnant slave. This ruse rarely worked, however. Some of the more fortunate ones became servants for the foreign fighters who poured into the caliphate from seventy countries.⁶⁵ But ISIS recruits in the caliph’s army included ex-cons, drug dealers, and petty criminals who relished their newfound status as “masters” and loved the idea of having servants, mansions, and nice cars they never could have afforded in their previous minimum-wage lives. By coming to Raqqa, they could transform themselves into some idealized version of themselves transmuted from zero to hero, a brave soldier of God willing to sacrifice for the cause. Most of the European recruits were poor, uneducated, and barely conversant about their faith. Two examples profiled in the media, Yusuf Sarwar and Mohammed Ahmed, had ordered Islam for Dummies from Amazon.com before they left Birmingham, England, to fight in Syria in 2013. One could deduce that their knowledge of Islam was cursory at best if the Dummies series served as their religious guidebook.⁶⁶

Sometimes Sunni women were also presented as gifts to fighters based on ISIS’s hierarchy of fighters and commanders (emirs).⁶⁷ Some girls were bought and sold dozens of times. One Yezidi woman recounted that during her captivity she had six different owners. When one fighter wanted a new sexual partner or simply needed to settle a debt, she was handed off to the next foreign fighter. She described the men as “monsters who treated us like animals.”⁶⁸

Captive women before and after their sale would be tied to a bed and forced to endure daily assaults. Most of the girls who were not servants were violated multiple times a day, regardless of any stories they devised about being married and having children, despite how much they begged for mercy.⁶⁹ Gang rape was common. The girls’ food rations were paltry, consisting of a biscuit or two for an entire day. The foreign fighter women could be crueler to the Yezidis than the men, as the women of the household resented having younger, prettier, lighter-skinned women they perceived to be rivals for their husband’s affection living under the same roof. For the wives, the slave girls were interlopers whom they beat and humiliated. The way the captive women and girls were treated was dehumanizing. As one account put it: “’[The jihadists] took women, abused them and killed them.’ … [T]hey bought and sold their Yazidi captives or passed them around as sexual slaves. ‘A woman was shifted from one man to another unless it was to one who had a bit of mercy… . [I]f [a girl] was in good condition, she would carry on. If not, she would get married to avoid being abused.”⁷⁰

The ISIS jihadis subjected even the youngest girls to physical and psychological abuse. One ten-year-old was sold to eight different fighters successively. With each move to a new master, the torture and sexual violence began again. Several of the girls attempted suicide. Two hanged themselves from ceiling fans, while another slit her wrists rather than endure being sold and resold repeatedly.⁷¹ Some plotted their escape and tried to steal a cell phone to call their families in hopes of arranging a rescue. The New York Times recounted the harrowing experiences of a freed captive, sixteen-year-old Yasmin, who was so sick of being raped by ISIS fighters she doused herself in gasoline and lit a match, knowing that if she survived the immolation, she would be so disfigured that the militants might no longer find her desirable. Kizilhan, who treated Yasmin after she was rescued, described her as “looking like a zombie. Children cry when they see her.”⁷²

The stories that emerged in the years after the Yezidis fled Mount Sinjar, it was clear that ISIS considered Yezidi (and Shi’a) women to be nothing more than chattel. According to Kizilhan, ISIS fighters had dehumanized and devalued Yezidis to such an extent that they minimized the sexual exploitation of Yezidi women and children and the slaughtering of their men as equivalent to “killing a chicken.”⁷³

The foreign-born fighters felt no remorse or empathy toward the enslaved Yezidis, according to Nadia Murad, the ISIS survivor who became a human rights activist and Nobel Prize laureate. In her autobiography she described how the Yezidi girls pleaded with the Arab and foreign fighter women in the household hoping to elicit some basic kindness and sympathy.⁷⁴ Among the most notorious foreign fighters were four British citizens nicknamed “the Beatles,” among them Mohammed Emwazi, dubbed “Jihad John” by the Western press. The four British men were responsible for some of ISIS’s most infamous atrocities, such as beheading foreign journalists and aid workers. According to the Daily Mail, “[They] held more than twenty Western hostages—and beheaded seven American, British and Japanese journalists and aid workers and a group of Syrian soldiers … including David Haynes, Alan Hemming, and James Foley.”⁷⁵

The journalist Jenan Moussa interviewed another of the so-called Beatles, El Shafee Elsheikh, and asked him what he thought about the enslavement of Yezidis. Detached, unremorseful, refusing to make eye contact with her, Elsheikh justified Yezidi children’s enslavement and dismissed any relation to the abolition of slavery in the West. “I don’t denounce slavery,” he told her. “Just because America decided to abolish something … It does not mean that every person has to run behind America and say: it [slavery] is now an abominable act.”⁷⁶

“Memories and Trauma”

During their time under ISIS’s control, Yezidi children experienced torture, sexual violence, and armed conflict. They were forced to participate in hostilities—even murder—and were victims of ISIS barbarism. These children suffered from what they saw, what they did, and what was done to them. Many had to witness crimes against humanity, including crimes committed against their own families. According to Amnesty International, “ISIS members beat and tortured many of these children, and, in rarer cases, killed or raped them, often as punishment for their or their mothers’ perceived disobedience. Many were also forced to witness abuses against their mothers, including rape and other sexual violence.”⁷⁷

As a result of their experiences, the children suffer from post-traumatic stress, anxiety, and depression, which presents as psychosocial behavior like aggression, flashbacks, nightmares, and severe mood swings. They also suffer from identity crises, sleep disorders, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). According to medical experts, these symptoms are typical results of their experiences as child soldiers or victims of sexual violence.⁷⁸

In March 2021, Iraqi lawmakers passed a bill allowing for the repatriation of the surviving Yezidi women victimized by ISIS. Named the Yazidi (Female) Survivors Law, the legislation acknowledged that the Yezidi people had been victims of genocide and called for compensation, rehabilitation, and education for the survivors. However progressive the 2021 law, it intentionally avoided any discussion or even mention of the children born to Yezidi women forcibly impregnated by ISIS fighters.⁷⁹ This omission was conspicuous because virtually every Yezidi girl aged nine to seventeen had been raped, and many suffered permanent physical damage, including the inability to have children in the future.⁸⁰

Research has demonstrated that gender-based wartime violence is intended to break women’s spirit. A Human Rights Watch report states, “The humiliation, pain, and terror inflicted by the rapist is meant to degrade not only the individual woman but also to strip the humanity from the larger group of which she is a part.”⁸¹ The deliberate impregnation of women ruptures the fabric of society by causing confusion over the ethnic identity of the next generation and causes the offspring to be rejected by their society. According to a report cited by Amnesty International: “ ‘For children born of rape and sexual slavery where proof of paternity may be impossible, the Iraqi law does not have any provisions for this category of children,’ which means that it can be extremely difficult or even impossible to register them. Furthermore … under Iraqi law, children with … ‘unknown’ fathers are automatically registered as Muslim.”⁸²

The Yezidi children born because of wartime sexual violence remain stateless and without legal protections at this writing. Like all children born under these conditions around the world, the “children of bad memories” are stigmatized for life—through no fault of their own.⁸³ Refusing to accept the children as members of a community empowers sexual aggressors and renders the tactic successful. Because the Yezidi High Council decreed that only the Yezidi women were welcome back to the community, but not the children that resulted from their capture, the women were pressured to separate from their children to conform to religious and societal norms. This requirement has undoubtedly intensified their anguish.

The theoretical questions about gender-based violence during conflict have long intrigued scholars of international relations and comparative politics. Researchers observed that while rape is associated with gender-based violence historically, it varies from conflict to conflict and is not consistent across all cases. In some conflicts rape is systematic, while in others, sexual violence might be proscribed. The existence of this variation means that gender-based violence in war is not a given. It is also noteworthy that wartime rape targets not only women and girls but also men and boys.⁸⁴

Sexual trespass against women has been a feature of warfare for millennia, even though it varies and should not be assumed to be a natural or predictable part of conflict. The extent to which Boko Haram and ISIS targeted women brought the issue of gender-based violence back to the forefront, much as the conflict in Bosnia had fifteen years prior.

Rape and Forced Marriage: The Myths and Reality of Jihad al Nikah

In April 2015, the United Nations released a report about sexual violence during war. The UN expressed “grave concern” about the numerous accounts of rape, sexual slavery, and forced marriage perpetrated by jihad organizations and armed groups in Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Nigeria, Mali, Libya, and Yemen.⁸⁵ Gender-based violence violated United Nations Security Council resolution 1820, passed in June 2008, which states that “women and girls are particularly targeted by the use of sexual violence, including as a tactic of war to humiliate, dominate, instill fear in, disperse and/or forcibly relocate civilian members of a community or ethnic group.”⁸⁶

While many jihadist groups perpetrated wide-scale gender-based violence, none were as prodigious as ISIS and Boko Haram, which systematized and routinized sexual violence against women and girls. The story of women traveling to Syria in search of a husband—jihad al-nikah—or sexual jihad, first gained traction in 2013, when, according to the BBC, Tunisian authorities arrested 19 girls and women accused of sexual relations with militants as part of a “campaign to improve morale.”⁸⁷ Tunisian interior minister Lotfi bin Jeddo alleged that women and girls were traveling to Syria to support fighters, and that they were exchanged among anywhere from twenty to thirty to perhaps as many as one hundred rebels.⁸⁸ After these “sexual exploits … they returned home pregnant.”⁸⁹ The rumor of a “sexual jihad” had been circulating in Tunisia from April 2013 onward, when the most senior Muslim religious authority in Tunisia, Grand Mufti Othman Batikh, caused an uproar when he seemingly endorsed that Tunisian girls were going to Syria for the purpose of jihad al-nikah and providing male fighters with “relief.”⁹⁰

The Iraqi activist Zainab Al-Suwaij, executive director of the American Islamic Congress, interviewed women in Tunisia who had traveled to Syria for jihad al-nikah. They told her they had been lured by entreaties to do something for the Islamic community—only to realize they were nothing more than modern-day “comfort women” for the mujahideen. After being passed around from one fighter to the next, in direct violation of Islamic law, the women returned to Tunisia and were met with scorn and accusations of promiscuity and were arrested.⁹¹

Noureddine al-Khadimi, the Tunisian minister of religious affairs, rejected the online fatwa (religious ruling) calling on young women to support the Syrian “jihad” by providing sexual favors. Tunisian news sites and social media disseminated the fatwa, which was traced back to a Saudi Wahhabi cleric, Sheikh Mohamad al-Arefe. The fatwa urged women to boost the morale of jihadists fighting President Bashar al-Assad’s brutal regime “by marrying them for a few hours.” There was an Islamic tradition of mut’ah marriage, a temporary arrangement contracted for a fixed period (days or hours) involving remuneration, which was a traditional mechanism of concealing prostitution but tended to be associated with Shi’a not Sunni Islam. Al-Arefe denied that he had issued the edict, saying, “No person in their right mind would approve of such a thing.”⁹² But other jihadists came forward and insisted that jihad al-nikah did exist. In my interviews with women leaders from Tunisian civil society organizations, they confirmed that Tunisian women were being lured to Syria and that jihad al-nikah was real.⁹³

Skeptics continued to suggest that the existence of jihad al-nikah was a specious rumor spread by propagandists to undermine Tunisia’s Ennahda party or to damage the Muslim Brotherhood’s reputation.⁹⁴ The journalist Christopher Reuter suggested that it was an attempt led by Assad’s regime to undermine the credibility of Syrian opposition parties, “a secret and elaborately staged effort to sow doubt and confusion—and divert attention away from the Syrian government’s own crimes.”⁹⁵ Now we know that the rumors were at least partly true, with hundreds, if not thousands, of female jihadists who traveled to join ISIS’s caliphate in Syria, Iraq, and Libya.⁹⁶

Equally salient, the abuse of women by jihadists in Syria and Iraq was allegedly exaggerated until ISIS fighters captured Mount Sinjar in April 2014, at which point ISIS’s gender-based violence was exposed to be systematic, deliberate, and institutionalized.⁹⁷ While it is removed from the phenomenon of ISIS’s volunteer “brides” in search of mujahid husbands described in chapter 1, mass rape and sexual slavery became part of ISIS strategy. In the words of one veteran journalist: “Young fighters consider the possession of women, whether [from] the areas they seize or through voluntary recruitment, to be useful only for the purposes of marriage. But, in fact, it is not marriage in the traditional sense, but the exploitation of young girls. The militants themselves describe this as ‘sexual jihad.’ ”⁹⁸

Rape as a Strategy of War

Back in 2000 a UN report delved into the general impact of rape on women in conflict, finding that the victims “are frequently shunned, ostracized, and considered unmarriageable. Permanent damage to the reproductive system, which often results from sexual violence, has different implications for women than for men.”⁹⁹ The literature on sexual violence during wartime posits that it might be one of the most effective strategies of population control: cheap, low tech, and readily available. Preliminary studies of demographic changes in, for example, the former Yugoslavia suggest that unlike refugees or displaced persons, who may temporarily flee the disputed areas and then return, rape victims were less likely to make territorial demands at a later date. This is in part explained by the fact that targeting women had an enduring negative impact on the society’s cohesiveness. Studies of the demographic shifts in Stolac demonstrate this dynamic.¹⁰⁰

Gender-based violence in wartime undermines the desire to return to the conquered territories as it undermines the cohesiveness of the targeted community by attacking society’s foundation: women. Targeting the civilian population, of which women form a majority, constitutes a crucial element of offensive warfare as part of “population control tactics.” Rape might ensure that the targeted population will not return largely because the immediate victims (the women) are ostracized by their own community, and the extended victims (their families) are traumatized and demoralized. In part, this is because rape victims are highly likely to be re-victimized by their own communities, where they are reviled and abandoned.¹⁰¹

Given the options available, wartime sexual violence as a policy is effective and seemingly risk-free by comparison. The UN Genocide Convention of 1948 did not include rape as a war crime, although both the Nuremberg and Tokyo war crimes tribunals referenced it. Until recently, wartime sexual violence had not been prosecuted as a serious crime against humanity.

Columbia University professor of international affairs Tanya Domi explains:

20,000 rapes were committed in the 1999 Kosovo War, and four Serbian commanders were prosecuted at the Hague. The Rwandan Tribunal, the international court which adjudicated those charged in the 1994 Rwandan Genocide successfully prosecuted the first case that recognized rape as a tool for committing genocide. In the four months of the genocide, an estimated 250,000 to 500,000 women, most of them Tutsi, were raped.¹⁰²

Part of the problem was that rape was historically regarded as a crime against a woman’s honor rather than her physical integrity, for example, in the 1948 Geneva Convention. Prior to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, wartime rape might have been misconstrued as an unintended and unavoidable consequence of war, a misconception based on the assumption that soldiers were naturally violent and that women—seen as chattel and property for centuries—were one of the rewards of victory.¹⁰³ According to Human Rights Watch, wartime rape “has long been mischaracterized and dismissed by military and political leaders as a private crime or the unfortunate behavior of a renegade soldier.”¹⁰⁴

The pervasiveness of rape during conflict is assumed to be connected to the nature of war itself: “War is hell,” and one of its concomitants is rape.¹⁰⁵ The assertion of the “universality of rape” in the feminist literature translated to a natural expectation of rape during conflict because the act of war was inherently a rape, rather than taking into account that rape is sometimes used as a deliberate tool by policy makers to effect desired changes in the ethnic balance of disputed areas.¹⁰⁶

As a result of widespread and deliberate targeting of women in Bangladesh, an additional protocol was added to the Genocide Convention in 1977.¹⁰⁷ With the signing of the Rome Statute in July 2002, however, accountability and prosecution began, but only on a case-by-case basis. Enforcement mechanisms were often weak. More difficult still was that legal precedents tended not to carry over from case to case.¹⁰⁸ Consequently, rape has a comparable impact to mass killing but without the same threat of sanctions, because rape has been regarded as a lesser crime. Many ethnic civil wars revolve around acquiring and securing the enemy’s territory. In ethnic civil wars, population controls depend wholly on territorial control and reducing the enemy’s mobilization base using torture, terror, displacement, and genocide.¹⁰⁹ Rape is part of this overall strategy.

To say that wartime rape is a deliberate strategy presupposes that even the most horrifying acts and atrocities committed during war might be calculated at some level of decision-making.¹¹⁰ This also means that acts of gender-based violence are not random; nor are they inevitable because men cannot control their sexual urges. Wartime sexual violence and other atrocities might be more prevalent when power and capabilities are relatively equally distributed between the sides and there is a need to tip the balance using tactics intended to terrorize the target population. This tactic is intended to cause the other side to become so demoralized that they will demobilize or flee. This explains rape in conflicts over land and patterns of ethnic cleansing.¹¹¹ This is true whether it is ISIS raping Yezidis in Iraq or Russian soldiers raping Ukrainian women in Bucha.¹¹²

Sexual violence becomes part of nationalist mythmaking. During ethnic conflicts, in wartime, it is a means of constructing group identity and identifying the out groups that the perpetrators consider to be the enemy. It may even be used to undo the bonds of family, friendship, and cooperation. Conflict functions as a demobilizer in areas that might have been integrated ethnically. State-sponsored rape campaigns rip families and neighbors apart.¹¹³

Writing about the former Yugoslavia and areas of conflict that predate ISIS’s attacks in Sinjar by decades shows that much of what analysts observed about deliberate and systematic campaigns of sexual violence continue to apply. One of the primary goals of ethnic war “is the destruction/deconstruction of culture, and not necessarily [just] the military defeat of the enemy army,” as the feminist scholar Ruth Seifert noted in 2014.¹¹⁴ The deconstruction of culture, however, is achieved through injuring and destroying human beings.¹¹⁵ For scholars such as Seifert and Elaine Scarry, women are the standard-bearers of society; they perpetuate a group’s culture and therefore are among the first targets of ethnic cleansing.

This demonstrates a certain “intersectionality,” as gender overlaps with other aspects of women’s identity such as ethnicity, religion, social class, and political affiliation.¹¹⁶ Wartime sexual violence reconfigures identities, since one of its goals is forcibly impregnating women and holding them until they can no longer terminate the unwanted pregnancy (assuming this is even an option, for in many countries, terminating a pregnancy—even under these circumstances—is illegal).¹¹⁷ In Bosnia, the women were told that this was being done to them so they would “give birth to little Chetniks.”¹¹⁸ This is the goal of forced impregnation; patriarchal groups mistakenly assume that ideology and identity is a trait that can be biologically inherited from the father.¹¹⁹ Claudia Card writes, “Where the so-conceived child’s social identity is determined by that of the biological father, impregnation by martial rape can undermine family solidarity […] national, political, and cultural solidarity, changing the next generation’s identity, confusing the loyalties of all victimized survivors.”¹²⁰

Comparable to the abuses ISIS inflicted on the Yezidis, wartime sexual violence has been used in Bangladesh, Bosnia, Kashmir, Rwanda, and Nigeria to create a generation of children whom their community rejected.¹²¹ This is what R. Charli Carpenter refers to when she describes the children born of wartime sexual violence as “les enfants mauvais souvenirs,” or children of bad memories.¹²² Although a woman raped by the enemy may put her child’s identity into question within her community, if, by contrast, the victim’s community refuses to accept patriarchal notions of identity, the strategic utility of rape is mitigated.¹²³

There can be overlapping motivations for the use of wartime sexual violence. Sexual violence perpetrated by Islamic State fighters may have been in part a mechanism for reinforcing bonds among ISIS members, transforming a motley crew of opportunists, criminals, and sociopaths into a cohesive unit of true believers.¹²⁴ ISIS’s own propaganda sanctioned terrible acts toward those who refused to convert. Other motives for rape include punishment, torture, degradation, enforced impregnation, nationalist mythmaking, and occasionally reward. Card suggests one additional motive: “Women in patriarchies are such easy victims… . [They] are commonly unarmed and untrained for physical combat. Perpetrators need fear little direct reprisal.”¹²⁵

Women are targeted precisely because they are the carriers of culture. In a profound sense, in patriarchal structures, the sexual modesty of the nation’s women lies at the core of the group’s sense of cohesiveness and community. “In times of war,” writes Seifert, “the women are those who hold the families and the communities together.” Thus “their physical and emotional destruction aims at destroying the social and cultural stability [of the group]. Moreover, the psychological effects mass rapes have on the community concerned may lead to the devaluation and dissolution of the entire group.”¹²⁶ In other words, by attacking women, the enemy seeks to destroy a nation’s culture.¹²⁷

Wartime sexual violence is both implicitly and explicitly linked to broader social degradation and is intended to communicate a message of dominance.¹²⁸ In the aftermath of abuse, the damage done to the individual woman is obscured or compounded by the perceived harm to the entire community.

The Anfal Campaign in Iraq

Using wartime sexual violence as a strategy salts the target community with its psychological and biological effects. Years before ISIS engaged in the systematic campaign against Yezidi women, there was a precedent: Iraq targeted Kurdish women in much the same way. In 1987 Saddam Hussein launched an attack against the Kurds called the Anfal campaign.¹²⁹ Although women and children were supposed to be exempt from the Anfal campaign, Iraqi soldiers were in fact commanded to violate Kurdish women, ensuring long-lasting effects on the Kurdish population.¹³⁰ In certain parts of Iraq, children were likewise targeted.¹³¹ Rape was used to demoralize men, encourage flight, and reduce men’s capacity to carry on the fight. According to Mukhabarat (Iraqi secret police) files and human rights reports, not only were women targeted as a matter of policy, but also the soldiers were ordered to violate the women in front of their husbands and families to ensure that there were witnesses to the family’s shame, making it impossible for the women to hide the details of their experiences.¹³²

Jim Muir of the Christian Science Monitor reported at the time, “Many sources say that with stubborn political prisoners, it was common practice for female relatives to be brought in [with the men] and raped in front of them to extract confessions.”¹³³

On the basis of interviews with victims and eyewitnesses, the US government concluded that the Iraqi regime had committed war crimes—willful killing, torture, rape, pillage, hostage-taking, unlawful deportation, and associated acts. According to the Department of State:

The Special Rapporteur, human rights organizations, and opposition groups continue to receive numerous reports of women still suffering severe psychological trauma after they were raped while in custody. The security forces allegedly raped women captured during the Anfal Campaign and during the occupation of Kuwait. The [Iraqi] Government has never acknowledged these reports of rape or conducted any investigation. Although the regime made a variety of pronouncements against rape and other violent crimes during the year, it took no action against regime activists who committed this abuse.¹³⁴

According to Kanan Makiya, the Iraqi government created in its central security headquarters a “department in charge of overseeing the rape of Kurdish women,” adding a new level of bureaucratization to the policy. The practice was so widespread that standard operating procedures were established and routinized, with employees having designated functions to “violate women on command.” The activities were recorded as part of the individual’s secret police file. Each secret police prison contained a specially equipped room for the sole purpose of raping the women.¹³⁵

President George W. Bush mentioned Iraq’s systematic sexual violence when he appealed to the Iraqi people to revolt against the regime of Saddam Hussein in 2003: “We will tear down the apparatus of terror and we will help you to build a new Iraq that is prosperous and free. In a free Iraq, there will be no more wars of aggression against your neighbors, no more poison factories, no more executions of dissidents, no more torture chambers and rape rooms. The tyrant will soon be gone.”¹³⁶

Makiya confirmed Bush’s allegations: “There is no doubt that official rape was rampant in Iraq, maybe even out of control, lacking any sort of checks.” In the Iraqi case, once instituted, rape was difficult to contain. Rape had become normalized and thus spilled over to other communities such that Turcomans, Shi’ites, and Arab women were also victimized. The security forces during the 1980s raped Iraqi women of all ethnicities.¹³⁷

The use of rape in the Takrit area (where Saddam Hussein originated) was used to target aristocratic Sunni Arab families. The practice, which was called “breaking the eye,” was used against non-Takriti governors who had been imposed on the area by the central government. The governor would be forced to watch his wife gang-raped, after which the rapists would remove their masks to show the governor their faces and then disappear, killing no one. By the late 1970s, young women from aristocratic families were kidnapped at random off the streets, only to reappear weeks later. This happened to Sunni and Shi’a women from all strata of society.¹³⁸ In addition to the violation of the women in front of family members, when a rape resulted in pregnancy, it brought additional shame on the community. When US forces stormed the Iraqi prisons during the first Gulf War in March 1991, they found dozens of Kurdish women with infants born during their incarceration.

Kurdish families and friends of survivors denounced the victims, often only teenagers. The girls were isolated, excommunicated, and endured severe economic hardship. Having no source of income and little chance of marriage or access to work, the Kurdish women and girls had no choice but to become sex workers to survive and, according to Kurdish sources, were actively encouraged by Iraqi security personnel to do so.¹³⁹ This validated the families’ denunciation and made the initial shame a self-fulfilling prophecy.¹⁴⁰

Othering and ethnocentric myths have enduring societal ramifications well after the conflicts end, as we have seen in Bosnia, Rwanda, and Iraq.¹⁴¹ Stephen Van Evera has explained how “other-maligning myths” were used to “justify their cruelties against [the other side]. These myths can live on after the war to poison … relations in later years.”¹⁴²

Consequences of Wartime Gender-Based Violence

In August 2014, ISIS relocated the captive Yezidi women and children to Solagh, where, in the early hours of the sixteenth, they separated out the women who were past childbearing age and executed them.¹⁴³ This suggests that ISIS was engaged in parallel ethnic cleansing strategies, one whereby Yezidi women were intentionally targeted for sexual violence and the other whereby captors deliberately sought to impregnate them. Why else would they execute women too old to bear children but still capable of being sold as domestic labor?

The following April, ISIS released 216 Yezidi female hostages after eight months of captivity. The women exhibited numerous signs of physical abuse. Interviews conducted with them described a system of organized sexual violence, including assault, forced marriage, and sexual slavery. One woman was sold to a twenty-six-year-old Syrian ISIS member who abused her repeatedly over fifteen days, threatening to kill her daughters if she did not submit to his demands. A doctor treating women from Dohuk reported that, of 105 women and girls he examined, seventy had been violated during their captivity.¹⁴⁴ The women and girls exhibited symptoms of acute emotional distress and post-traumatic stress disorder. Although the girls were technically free, many remained separated from their families, who had been killed by ISIS militants or were still being held captive. Other survivors were shunned upon their release because of cultural honor codes that view them as “damaged goods” and social mores (specifically the honor code) that blame women for being victimized.

Atrocities result in acute, long-lasting psychological effects for the survivors, with almost 70 percent experiencing trauma-related disorders. In 2018 human rights experts documented rates of mental illness among the Yezidi population, based on clinical interviews, and found that 43 percent of Yezidi adults displaced in Turkey suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder and 40 percent suffered from major depression. Similar levels were found in Yezidi children in Turkey.¹⁴⁵

Among a different group of 108 female Yezidi former ISIS captives, researchers found that 50.9 percent had probable complex PTSD with multiple symptoms, while an additional 20 percent had some degree of PTSD. (PTSD typically follows a single traumatic event, while complex PTSD is associated with prolonged trauma when one’s destiny is under another’s control.)¹⁴⁶

By the time the women were released, Sinjar was 90 percent destroyed. Psychiatric treatment was not widely available in Iraq. There were only twenty-six psychologists and psychiatrists for the 5.5 million people living in the region. The number increased to eighty in 2017, but by 2021, there were still only one hundred.¹⁴⁷ The Free Yezidi Foundation Women’s Center was one of the primary local providers of psychiatric and rehabilitation care for women in the Xanke Camp in northern Kurdistan. Women aged twenty to thirty-five participated in the program. Yezidi refugees presented multiple trauma symptoms including seizures that caused the women to writhe on the floor as if reliving their trauma. Mohamad Elfakhani, a Canadian psychiatrist, treated Yezidi women and girls with symptoms of complex post-traumatic stress disorder, including dissociation and extreme sleeplessness.¹⁴⁸

The manner and extent to which people in the social community acknowledge the survivors’ experiences of violence are associated with the survivors’ well-being. Conversely, social rejection seems to promote and maintain the symptoms of psychological disorders. A significant association between family rejection, post-traumatic stress, and depression symptoms has been documented among women affected by conflict.

Because storytelling constitutes a large part of Yezidi culture, Yezidis may express their distress differently from European victims. Therapists treating Yezidi survivors used a form of narrative therapy to provide their patients the time and space to talk. The approach allowed survivors to tell their stories indirectly or speaking in the third person.¹⁴⁹

As a result, Yezidis had little hope for the future and thought more about just surviving and doing the best they could to keep going. According to Pari Ibrahim of the Free Yezidi Foundation, “The whole Yazidi community does not have trust in anyone anymore—especially the survivors of the torture, the rapes, the abuse.”¹⁵⁰

The focus from foreign journalists, as one human rights lawyer noted, “has mostly been on the rape. But there have been so many other atrocities that have been less reported. It’s hard to get people to cover the day-to-day struggles that people face: the lack of access to aid, getting medical care. But when [Yezidi women] talk about that and then they don’t get covered, then I think they are frustrated.”¹⁵¹

When Rape Victims Are Not Believed

Reading through this chapter about ISIS’s sexual abuse of Yezidi girls and Kurdish women targeted during the Anfal Campaign, as well as the Boko Haram kidnappings in the previous chapter, raises inevitable comparisons between the three terrorist organizations, all of which share comparable jihadi ideologies, and the events in Israel on October 7, 2023. As of spring of 2024, there were still nineteen women who were hostages.¹⁵² The major difference between schoolgirls kidnapped by Boko Haram or Yezidi women taken by ISIS and what happened on October 7 (and afterward) is that the women in Nigeria and Iraq were believed.

Disinformation about the Israel–Hamas war has proliferated online, with supporters of Palestinian self-determination refusing to believe the initial reports of abuse and Israeli supporters refusing to believe casualty figures from the Hamas-controlled Ministry of Health in Gaza. The mental gymnastics on display are troubling for women’s rights advocates, who perceived that this case of gender-based violence was being treated differently from previous cases of wartime rape in Darfur, the DRC Congo, Iraq, Nanjing, Nigeria, Rwanda, Ukraine, or Sudan.

When the story about Israeli women appeared forgotten after the horrors in Gaza came to light, a handful of American reporters refused to let the story die; because of journalists like Bianna Golodryga, Lesley Stahl, and Jake Tapper, survivors could share testimony that women and girls had been brutalized, as well as physically tortured and killed. The bodies were “cut to pieces,” and some were missing ears or hands. Alternatively, body parts were discovered a hundred meters away, having been severed from the victims. Many of the deceased were naked, something that is usually never found at the scene of a terrorist attack.¹⁵³ In December 2023, the White House national security spokesman John Kirby acknowledged that Hamas was using “sexual violence as a weapon and a tool. I think it’s safe to assume that they are still using sexual violence as a weapon, but I can’t speak to specific instances.”¹⁵⁴ President Biden condemned Hamas’s “horrific” use of sexual violence against women and girls in Israel during the October 7 attack. Politico reported, “The president, citing survivor and witness accounts, said Hamas repeatedly raped women and girls during the assault and that their bodies were mutilated while they were still alive.”¹⁵⁵

At the end of December 2023, two and a half months after the terrorist attack, the New York Times published a detailed and graphic account of the events at the Nova music festival and the Kfar Azar and Be’eri kibbutzim after interviewing 150 witnesses and first responders. Hamas, like ISIS in Iraq, had engaged in a systematic campaign of sexual abuse and mutilation of Israeli women. The Times reported details about one victim:

In a grainy video [recorded by a Hamas terrorist], you can see her, lying on her back, dress torn, legs spread, vagina exposed. Her face is burned beyond recognition and her right hand covers her eyes… . Israeli police officials said they believed that [the woman] was raped, and she has become a symbol of the horrors visited upon Israeli women and girls during the Oct. 7 attacks. Israeli officials say that everywhere Hamas terrorists struck—the rave, the military bases along the Gaza border and the kibbutzim—they brutalized women.¹⁵⁶

Yet even after the shocking New York Times reporting, journalists continued to hedge by adding the word “apparently” as a qualifier to describe what had happened. Journalists from The Intercept questioned the Times’ reporting and alleged that Anat Schwartz, the stringer used on the story, was inexperienced and had potential conflicts of interest.¹⁵⁷

Most of the women raped at the Nova music festival were killed on the spot, according to eyewitness accounts and survivors interviewed by Sheryl Sandberg in the documentary Screams before Silence.¹⁵⁸ This is a common feature of wartime rape whereby the perpetrators eliminate any witnesses to the crime. For supporters who demanded evidence of Hamas’s systematic abuse, there have been eyewitness testimonies and video evidence from Hamas’s GoPro recording devices. The Israeli police have over 200,000 visual images (videos and photographs) and have taken 2,000 testimonies.¹⁵⁹ Most of the immediate victims are dead and unable to testify about their assault. Considerable forensic evidence was lost, buried, destroyed, or is unavailable. In the hours after the Saturday morning attack, Israeli police and military were preoccupied with locating survivors and beating back the Hamas incursion. Many of the corpses were so mutilated and burned it made collecting evidence painstaking and, at times, when the bodies had been immolated, impossible. Finally, because of the sheer enormity of the massacre, ZAKA, the disaster victim emergency response team comprised of religious Jews that handle the aftermath of terrorist attacks, rushed to bury the corpses quickly according to Jewish law. “I did not take pictures because we are not allowed to take pictures,” said a ZAKA volunteer. “In retrospect, I regret it.”¹⁶⁰ But other ZAKA volunteers did take photos, which might be used in future prosecutions.

When ZAKA arrived on the scene, bodies were strewn everywhere. There were hundreds of corpses all along Route 232 or at the concession stands at the Nova music festival. One ZAKA volunteer, Haim Omatzgin, was so overwhelmed that he did not know what to do.¹⁶¹ There were so many bodies that the forensic evidence took weeks to process. “Israeli police acknowledged that, during the shock and confusion of 10/7, the deadliest day in Israeli history, they were not focused on collecting semen samples from women’s bodies,” reported the Times. Because of the scale of the massacre and the sheer number of bodies with signs of sexual abuse, many victims were buried without medical examinations, interring the forensic evidence in the process. Emergency medical workers cut down the women who had been tied to trees, clipped the zip-tied bodies and cleaned up “scenes of carnage”—inadvertently destroying the evidence in the process.¹⁶² The Times report stated that, as in some instances in the DRC Congo, women were not just raped but also penetrated with sharp objects, knives, and other weapons. Some bodies had indicators of torture, such as nails driven into the thighs and groin. Female IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) soldiers stationed in the southern outposts were found with their uniforms ripped off, their trousers around their ankles, and their underwear ripped and bloodied. Many of the female soldiers had also been shot in the groin or butchered with box cutters. Women were mutilated, and their breasts cut off. Hamas fighters reportedly tossed the breasts around and played with them. Others had collected severed hands, ears, or heads of Israeli women as trophies.

One eyewitness interviewed by CNN’s Jake Tapper saw a woman passed from one Hamas fighter to the next, “and while one of them was still inside her, he shot her in the head.”¹⁶³ This horrific incident was confirmed by Dutch journalist, Jotam Confino, who watched a forty-minute GoPro video giving evidence of the attack.¹⁶⁴ Members of the Israeli Defense Forces and volunteer medics described finding “more than 30 bodies of women and girls in and around the [music festival] site and in two kibbutzim … legs spread, clothes torn off, signs of abuse in their genital areas.” Another medic found the bodies of twenty-four women, naked or half naked, some mutilated, others tied up with zip ties, dead.¹⁶⁵ Another eyewitness recounted seeing groups of heavily armed gunmen rape and kill at least five women while she hid, covering herself with foliage and grass as camouflage: “A lot of terrorists go around us and search for people to kill. The terrorists, people from Gaza, raped girls. And after they raped them, they killed them, murdered them with knives, or the opposite, killed—and after they raped, they—they did that. They laughed. They always laughed. It’s—I can’t forget how they laughed.”¹⁶⁶

Harrowing reports included an account of two teenage sisters, aged thirteen and sixteen, attacked in their home. One paramedic told CNN that these girls were found in their bedroom; one had been raped and killed on the bed and the other was on the floor: “[The one on the floor had her] pants pulled down [to] her knees and … a bullet wound on the back side of her neck near her head… . There [was] a puddle of blood around her head and … semen on the lower part of her back.” The girl on the bed was covered in bruises and had a bullet wound to the chest.¹⁶⁷

In addition to the dozens of women raped on the day of October 7, it has been reported in the Israeli media that several of the hostages were raped during their captivity in Gaza. A temporary truce was called to try and get the hostages home, and the first round of prisoner exchanges began on November 24, 2023. Thirteen women and children, ranging in age from two to eighty-five, were turned over to the International Red Cross, transported to Egypt, and flown to Israel. This first group also included ten Thai farm workers who had been employed on the kibbutzim. The following day, November 25, a second batch of hostages was released, thirteen women and children. On November 26, fourteen more hostages, including a US citizen and three more Thai nationals, were released. On November 27, eleven Israelis were released, all of whom had been abducted from the kibbutz Nir Oz. Twelve hostages were released on November 28, including ten Israelis and two Thai nationals. On November 29, the seventh day of the truce, Hamas released eight more Israeli hostages. By the beginning of December, the truce had broken down. As of December 1, 105 prisoners had been released (eighty-one of them Israeli women and children). As of August 21, 2024, 109 hostages remained in captivity.¹⁶⁸

Survivor testimony from Israelis freed in the prisoner exchanges has shown that a percentage of hostages were raped during their captivity, including a handful among those who had already been released. Maya Regev, a former detainee, testified before the Israeli Knesset that every single female hostage in Gaza had experienced some degree of sexual harassment and abuse. One of the mothers of a hostage still missing told the Israeli lawmakers that “rape [is] happening in Gaza. The [hostages] are being raped every day, and you are ignoring it!”¹⁶⁹ One doctor treating the returnees told the Associated Press that of the 105 hostages released in December 2023, “at least 10 men and women among those freed were sexually assaulted or abused.”¹⁷⁰ The graphic details of what occurred at the Nova music festival and at the Kfar Aza and Be’eri kibbutzim suggest one reason why Hamas refused to return the remaining Israeli women, despite several rounds of hostage exchanges: fear of the horror stories they would relate. An Israeli intelligence source confided in me that they are worried that the hostages are dead or that Hamas leadership refuses to release them because like the Nigerian women rescued from the Sambisa Forest, they will be heavily pregnant because of sexual assaults.¹⁷¹

Like the Yezidi women in Iraq and Syria in 2014, the hostages were kept in private residences with the local civilian population aiding and abetting the atrocities. Interviews with the freed hostages were aired on Keshet 12 news in Hebrew, though only a handful were interviewed by Western media.

From survivor testimony, whether women, girls, or boys were assaulted depended on which family hosted them. Some hostages remained relatively safe compared to others who were clearly abused. This scenario parallels the stories from Nadia Murad’s autobiography about her experiences as a Yezidi sabaya, a sex slave for ISIS. Some families offered protection while others offered none. Some families might have felt sympathetic, while other families resented the presence of the hostages, and especially the possible temptation the Israeli women posed to the husbands. The refusal to feed the hostages was a common complaint across all the interviews. This corresponds with the mistreatment that Yezidis suffered in Iraq and Syria detailed in this chapter. Mia Schem was one of the best-known former hostages, in part because Hamas released a video of her on October 17, ten days after the attack. Schem, who was held in the home of a married couple, suspected that the only reason she was not raped was that the man’s wife stood sentry outside the door. She was quite sure that “had [her captor] been alone he would have tried something.”¹⁷² According to Schem, the wife despised the fact that her husband spent time in the room with her, without a chaperone, something that would never happen with a Muslim girl. As the Times of Israel reported, one teenage hostage, Agam Goldstein-Almog, who was seized along with her mother, “feared being raped or sexually abused, as other female hostages and victims are now known to have been.” Her captors threatened the seventeen-year-old, claiming that they would “find [her] a husband” and she would be “married off” to someone in Gaza.¹⁷³

Being violated was the hostages’ greatest concern, Agam’s mother, Chen, told an interviewer: “There were girls there who were alone, alone for 50 days, 19-year-olds, alone, who went through difficult things, personally. They were violated, harmed, some were injured.” Men and boys were also abused and tortured.¹⁷⁴ Yarden Roman-Gat told 60 Minutes that the fear of sexual assault constantly hung over her during her fifty-four days in captivity. The women were treated as trophies, as throngs of Gazans surrounded the vehicles spiriting the captives out of Israel and celebrated the successful raid and war booty, what Stahl referred to as moving through “gauntlets of terror.” Yarden worried that she would be raped and was grateful to have been spared the trauma. The hijab she was forced to wear offered a degree of protection.¹⁷⁵

During their time in captivity, the Israeli hostages were taunted with jokes about Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier who had been held hostage for five years. In several interviews the freed hostages related similar narratives: they had been held in small rooms in private homes under strict orders not to make a sound. This did not mean that Hamas was worried about Israeli targeted assassination or the IDF locating them. The hostages were told that their silence was for their own protection against being lynched by the angry mobs outside.¹⁷⁶ Fear of the mob was not hyperbolic. Numerous Israelis had been publicly lynched in the past, for example, the lynching in Ramallah of two IDF soldiers in October 2000. More telling were the images of battered and bloodied women captives used by Hamas as propaganda after the group lied about not knowing where the remaining women and girls were being held.¹⁷⁷

The hostages who had returned in 2023 were found to be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and survivor guilt. The doctor who examined them, Itai Pessach, believed that Palestinians in Gaza were also suffering from PTSD: “When they undergo events such as this, this will take its toll, and it doesn’t matter if they’re on this side or the other side.”¹⁷⁸ The extent of destruction in Gaza, the man-made famine, and shocking death toll means that both communities are forever changed by this event and subsequent war. Pessach told Sheryl Sandberg that women kept in Gaza had been drugged, raped, and branded, and he expressed concern that many were possibly pregnant from repeated abuse.¹⁷⁹

From the perspective of the hostages, after the gauntlets of terror, they could not differentiate between Hamas and many regular Palestinians. To the hostages, the Gazans had not been innocent bystanders to their torture. As Mia Schem told Keshet 12 News: “There is no one single innocent civilian there. Not one.” The captives’ traumatic experiences changed the way many of these previously left-leaning Israelis perceived Gazan civilians, some of whom appear to have been complicit. The communities in Kfar Aza and Be’eri tended to be populated with aging hippies and far-left peaceniks. What they have learned since October 7 shifted them and many Israelis to the right.¹⁸⁰ At the time of this writing, there remained 109 hostages in Gaza. In her interview Agam Goldstein-Almog said that before the attack, “we believed that there are no bad people—only people who have it bad. But there are bad people… . We will never forgive and we will never show any kind of empathy towards these people. If we previously believed that there was a chance for peace, we’ve lost all faith in these people, especially after we were there and among the population.”¹⁸¹

Video footage from October 7 of Palestinian civilians carting away the Israeli girls, or surrounding and converging on hostages like Yarden Bibas, battered and drenched in his own blood, contributes to this polarization,¹⁸² which has aggravated both the rape and atrocity denials, inuring people’s empathy for the other side. The events of October 7 and the ensuing destruction of Gaza has pushed the sides to retreat to their respective corners, and as one Atlantic article puts it, made them “unwilling to see the humanity in the other, and makes the long-term goal of peaceful coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians that much more difficult to achieve.”¹⁸³ One Israeli comment posted to social media about Bibas’s capture expressed this sentiment: “Whenever you feel you’re about to cry for the poor Gazan civilians who are suffering in this war, watch this video [of Yarden Bibas]. You’ll feel instantly better. You’ll remember who started the war, why Israel is retaliating, and how it could be ended any second.”¹⁸⁴

On April 26, 2024, former Meta executive and feminist icon Sheryl Sandberg released a documentary, Screams Before Silence, about the October 7 events. Details absent from the newspaper coverage show in graphic detail the extent of the humiliation and violence of the day. In the documentary, released hostage Amit Soussana describes how she was surrounded by ten men whom she tried to fight off. Her greatest fear was that she would be assaulted and her body dragged through the streets of Gaza.¹⁸⁵

Cruelty and Silence of the International Community

In other campaigns of sexual brutality against women explored in this book, the international community did not hesitate to react. Such incidents usually caused an immediate response. The #BringBackOurGirls social media campaign went viral in a matter of days after the kidnapping of the Chibok schoolgirls.¹⁸⁶ Not in this case. It took most international human rights organizations and women’s groups over eight weeks to address the fact that Hamas terrorists had raped Israeli women and girls.¹⁸⁷ Writing in The Guardian, Deborah Lipstadt and Michèle Taylor articulated what this author felt: that there was a double standard applied that treated Hamas’s widespread gender-based brutality exceptionally from other cases presented in this book:

When other groups have been subjected to gender-based violence, feminist leaders, women’s groups and UN bodies, including independent experts, have moved swiftly—in some cases within days—to speak out. This was true even while the victims were still seeking justice. Such was the case during the brutal crackdowns on Iranian women and girls and their protests, Yazidi women under the genocidal Islamic State reign, and Nigerian girls at the hands of Boko Haram.¹⁸⁸

United Nations Secretary General António Guterres and UN Women (the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women) failed even to acknowledge the attacks for almost eight weeks. The reluctance to credit the reports of eyewitnesses marked a sharp deviation from the global commitment to believe all women. For Lipstadt and Taylor, it mimicked Holocaust denial: Jewish women were not considered reliable and were not believed.¹⁸⁹ It wasn’t until December 2023 that UN Women issued this statement: “We unequivocally condemn the brutal attacks by Hamas on Israel on 7 October. We are alarmed by the numerous accounts of gender-based atrocities and sexual violence during those attacks. This is why we have called for all accounts of gender-based violence to be duly investigated and prosecuted, with the rights of the victim at the core.”¹⁹⁰

Despite the international community’s begrudging recognition, Hamas, and many of its supporters on the far left, continued to deny that any sexual crimes were committed, even though they admitted to it under questioning. According to an NBC News report: “During interrogations, captured Hamas militants talked about raping women and children as a Hamas tactic of war. ‘To have our way with them, to dirty them, to rape them,’ said one Hamas militant during a videotaped interrogation. Another captured militant refers to dead bodies [being] raped… . ‘Having sex with dead bodies,’ the militant said in a videotaped interrogation reviewed by NBC News.”¹⁹¹

Whether the Palestinian confessions were elicited under duress cannot be determined. The Israeli press aired several confessions, including one by Manar Qassem, a militant affiliated with the Palestinian Islamic Jihad who was arrested by the IDF in Khan Younis. Under interrogation, Qassem confessed to having raped a woman on October 7. He explained, “ ‘The devil took over me, I laid her down, started undressing her and did what I did.’ When asked by an interrogator what exactly he did, he replied, ‘I raped her.’ ”¹⁹² Amit Soussana described her captor Muhammad’s reaction to sexually assaulting her with similar words: “I was bad.”¹⁹³

On January 8, 2024, two UN human rights experts, Alice Jill Edwards, the special rapporteur on torture, and Morris Tidball-Binz, the special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary, or arbitrary executions, called for an independent investigation of Hamas, given the “growing body of evidence about reported sexual violence” that would constitute premeditated war crimes or crimes against humanity.¹⁹⁴ At the invitation of the Israeli Foreign Ministry, Pramila Patten, the UN special representative on sexual violence in conflict, visited Israel.¹⁹⁵ The Association of Rape Crisis Centers in Israel, an umbrella organization representing Israel’s nine rape crisis centers, prepared a report for Patten, based on eyewitness reports, survivors, and first responders’ forensic evidence in which they identified four main arenas where rape had been used as a weapon of war: at the Supernova music festival near Re’im; on the Gaza border communities; at the IDF military bases infiltrated by Hamas; and sexual abuse of hostages inside the Strip. The special report, titled “Silent Cry,” released in February 2024 by the Association of Rape Crisis Centers in Israel provided the most comprehensive description of the sexual violence and abuse that took place on October 7.¹⁹⁶ The report was published days after The Intercept questioned the validity of the New York Times’ reporting. Despite these doubts, or explicit denials by Hamas,¹⁹⁷ Patten’s UN report was clear that rape happened, although her ability to fully investigate the violations or charge violators was limited by having no access to hostages still in Hamas’s custody and difficulties in ascertaining the scope, rather than the occurrence, of the gender-based violence.¹⁹⁸

A statement from the Association of Rape Crisis Centers in Israel said: “The report clearly demonstrates that this is not a ‘malfunction’ or isolated incident, but a clear operational strategy involving systematic, targeted sexual abuse.” The Times of Israel writes that this counters “the claims of some pro-Palestinian activists who have denied the extent of Hamas’s weaponization of rape.”¹⁹⁹

Patten’s report found “reasonable grounds to believe that conflict-related sexual violence occurred during the 7 October attacks in multiple locations across Gaza periphery, including rape and gang rape.”²⁰⁰ It called for further investigations in the future to establish how widespread the attacks were since some claims were not based on firsthand accounts. Those included claims that Hamas fighters cut off a woman’s breast and gang-raped her.²⁰¹ A Vox article states that “Israel and others condemned the UN for its perceived indifference toward the plight of the alleged victims, but at the same time, authorities have refused to give access to the proper UN bodies that could thoroughly investigate the alleged crimes.”²⁰²

In February 2024, the US Congress voted unanimously (with Rashida Tlaib from Michigan abstaining) to condemn Hamas’s rape of Israeli women on October 7. Lois Frankel, the Democrat from Florida, introduced the bill that called for “all nations to criminalize rape and sexual assault and hold accountable all perpetrators of sexual violence, including state and non-state armed groups.” The Detroit News reported that “the resolution passed with a 418 to 0 vote. U.S. Rep. Rashida Tlaib, a Democrat from Detroit, was the lone lawmaker to vote ‘present’ during the tally, blaming the resolution for falling short of ‘acknowledging the sexual abuse of Palestinians.’ ”²⁰³

Several survivors, like Amit Soussana and Maya Regev, came forward to describe their experiences in part to combat the disinformation campaigns denying that rape had occurred.²⁰⁴ Despite the testimony, the reports, and the Screams before Silence documentary, there are large numbers of supporters for Palestinian rights that refuse to acknowledge rape occurred on October 7. Some have even tried to argue that in fact it was not Hamas but the IDF who were raping Palestinian women.

In March 2024, Al Jazeera briefly published a story that members of the IDF raped Palestinian women at the Al-Shifa hospital, which was quickly debunked. Al Jazeera’s former news director, Yasser Abuhilalah, grudgingly admitted in a tweet: “It was revealed through Hamas investigations that the story of the rape of women in Al-Shifa Hospital was fabricated … The woman who spoke about rape justified her exaggeration and incorrect talk by saying that the goal was to arouse the nation’s fervor and brotherhood.” He added that “as if more than thirty thousand martyrs, ninety thousand wounded, about a million displaced people, and comprehensive destruction were not enough!”²⁰⁵ The story gained traction because there is a long-standing fear among Palestinian women that Israeli soldiers will rape them,²⁰⁶ despite the fact that sexual violence (versus harassment) in this conflict has been rare.²⁰⁷

Short-Term Solutions

Solutions to mitigating wartime sexual violence lies largely with the international community and partly with local communities. Women’s accounts must be believed and respected. International law must prosecute wartime rape more effectively and increase the political and legal price paid by perpetrators. Investigative procedures must accommodate women’s desire for privacy and understand their unwillingness to speak to male investigators about their experiences. At the same time, no international rules and regulations will make families accept their women and children if rape is stigmatized and its victims are blamed for bringing shame onto the family.

The complex nature of international law has resulted in few prosecutions for gender-based violence during war. The International Criminal Court (ICC) established by the Rome Statute in July 1998 has not alleviated the problem as much as it has subsumed rape under three disparate categories: a war crime, a crime against humanity, and genocide. Yet the law doesn’t define when and under what circumstances rape will be prosecuted.²⁰⁸ There are also ways to evade ICC prosecution; for example, because of a double indemnity clause, aggressor states can bypass international human rights law by conducting their own proceedings, avoiding an international trial.

If wartime rape is a crime of genocide, then universal jurisdiction should be applied and those responsible prosecuted whether the countries are signatories to the ICC or not.²⁰⁹ The biggest impediment to applying universal jurisdiction, however, has been the United States. Fearing retribution by rogue states and seeking to protect American soldiers, the George W. Bush administration refused to sign on to the agreement, aligning instead with nondemocratic and autocratic regimes like those in China, Libya, and Iraq.²¹⁰ Despite multiple administrations since then, all US presidents have opposed the international court, which would hold US military and political leaders to a uniform global standard of justice. While there are no easy solutions, changes to international law might make rape more costly to perpetrators. But it will be the local communities that decide whether women will be blamed and shamed or not.

There are fewer than 1 million Yezidis worldwide. Prior to the rise of the Islamic State, most lived in close-knit villages surrounded by extended family. By systematically separating families, ISIS sought to sever those ties.²¹¹ But even international justice for Yezidi women (for example, an international tribunal or an ICC case against ISIS) is limited without justice for the children. It may take generations for the community to recover from the trauma and suffering inflicted by ISIS’s campaign of persecution, murder, rape, and child indoctrination. ISIS perpetrated many war crimes. Yezidi children should not have to pay the price.

As ISIS lost territorial control of its caliphate, hundreds of Yezidis escaped during its military retreat. Women who returned to their villages, like the women kidnapped by Boko Haram, encountered social stigma.²¹² In addition, ISIS brainwashed the children into believing that they were devil worshippers and infidels and that they could never go back home because of what they did as Cubs, because they had converted to Islam (under duress), or because what had been done to them—that is, to the girls—violated the honor code and brought shame to the family. Those children born to Yezidi women who were impregnated by ISIS fighters were deemed undesirables and denied a place in the community, which considered these women outcasts who could never reenter society. The children feared their own community would punish or kill them if they tried to return.

Yezidi community leaders declared in March 2021 that the formerly enslaved women would be welcomed back but their children would not be allowed to join them. Although the kidnapped Yezidi children over six who had survived their captivity were repatriated, one category of child was rejected outright: community elders refused to accept any children whose biological fathers were members of ISIS. Yezidi culture considered only those born from two Yezidi parents to be members of the community. Jawhar Ali Beg, deputy to the senior Yezidi leader Prince Hazem Tahseen Said, explained that despite their having no contact with their birth father, and acknowledging that the women had given birth against their will, according to Iraqi law the children were automatically Muslim.²¹³

This proclamation was a reversal of an earlier decision in 2019 signed by Prince Hazem to “accept all survivors and accept that what happened to them was out of their control,” which would have allowed the women to return with all their children—including those born of rape.²¹⁴ The Supreme Yezidi Spiritual Council, however, rejected reintegration of the children and mandated that any child of a Muslim or “unknown” father had to be registered as a Muslim according to Iraqi law.

Even if the 2015 law were reformed to recognize the children’s ethnicity as Yezidi, not Muslim, the children—especially the boys—would still be vulnerable to retribution from the Yezidi community for what their biological fathers did or what they themselves might have done during their time as Cubs of the Caliphate. (ISIS used children as young as four as executioners.)

Because of the Supreme Yezidi Spiritual Council’s decision to reject any ISIS offspring, some Yezidi women with war babies refused to identify as Yezidi because they knew they would be separated from their children if they did.²¹⁵ Some Yezidi women ended up in the al-Hol detention camp in Syria along with thousands of ISIS women and children. Too afraid to let anyone know that they were Yezidi, they tried to blend in with the ISIS women in the camp, dressing in the same long black niqabs preferred by ISIS supporters. Or the women might move from tent to tent in the heavily guarded foreigner section of the camp, trying to blend in with the European female immigrants. According to an NPR report, “There are 11,000 women and children in the foreigner section, so it was easy to hide.”²¹⁶ The women were hiding from their ISIS tormenters, from those women who aided and abetted ISIS atrocities, from their own communities who reviled them, and from an international community that had forgotten them.

Yezidi women’s experiences of multilayered abuse (forced religious conversion, being sold in slave markets, witnessing people being beheaded or burned to death) and the Western media’s obsession with the lurid details left many Yezidi women feeling exposed and deprived of control over their own narratives.²¹⁷

“Iraq: Legacy of Terror,” a report from Amnesty International, detailed the complex trauma afflicting the women:

Many of these women are in desperate situations, in some cases experiencing severe mental anguish after being forced to separate from their children, and in others, remaining in IDP [internally displaced person] camps or with [ISIS] captors to avoid giving up their children. Several … said they were pressured, coerced and even deceived into leaving their children behind by family members or by individuals or groups who work to reunite captured Yezidi women and children with their families.²¹⁸

Yezidi women who wanted to keep their children were forced to look to the United Nations or the international community and move to third-party countries like Germany or France. As Al Jazeera reported, “The decision has left [the] mothers, already traumatised … facing a wrenching choice between keeping their children or staying with their [Yezidi] community.”²¹⁹ In Mosul, women-led civil society organizations found they had to interview young girls separately from their families because the girls refused to admit they had left their babies behind until they could discuss their experiences privately with a therapist.²²⁰

The human rights activist Nadia Murad, detailing her experiences as an ISIS captive, told the 2018 Doha Forum: “Out of the 6,000 Yezidi women who were abducted by ISIS, we hope to see at least one ISIS member who did this to one Yezidi woman be punished for the crimes they’ve committed against Yezidi women. And we hope to see them in court, in public.”²²¹

There have nevertheless been few legal mechanisms available to Yezidis seeking justice. In April 2021, the international lawyer and celebrity Amal Clooney filed a lawsuit in the United States Eastern District of Virginia on behalf of five Yezidi women against a female member of ISIS, Umm Sayyaf, the wife of ISIS financial officer Abu Sayyaf, who was killed by American Special Forces in 2015. She was taken alive, arrested, and held by Kurdish forces in Iraq. The couple had enslaved seven Yezidi girls (and an American aid worker, Kayla Mueller) in their home in al-Shaddadi, Syria.²²² Umm Sayyaf (whose real name is Nasrin As’ad Ibrahim Bahar) was accused of preparing Yezidi women and girls to be raped by ISIS militants (including by her husband and ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi).²²³ The US handed Sayyaf over to the interior ministry of the government of the semiautonomous Kurdistan Region (KRG) in 2015.²²⁴ The KRG tried Sayyaf in Erbil but called no witnesses. “The trial was closed to victims and the media. Sometime in the spring of 2016, Umm Sayyaf was reportedly convicted of a crime related to ISIL membership.”²²⁵ Because no action was taken for five years, in 2021, a Yezidi human rights organization filed a brief to enforce US prosecution, which the government deferred jurisdiction to the KRG, and the case remains open as of 2024.²²⁶

Ten years after the attack on Mount Sinjar, the Yezidis continued to deal with the legacy of ISIS and the trauma they endured.

At the end of their impassioned essay in January 2024, Deborah Lipstadt and Michèle Taylor provided the perfect summation. Rather than try to paraphrase, I present their words (and my full agreement), which are true regardless of the conflict, time, or place: “Rape and mutilation of women are never acceptable. There is no ‘but’ when it concerns gender-based violence. The use of sexual violence in conflict to coerce, terrorise, sow fear, or for any other reason is no exception. This is something on which we must all agree—regardless of our position on the broader conflict.”²²⁷

Even though Israel is unlikely to seek legal action against Hamas in the International Court of Justice (which is reserved for states), individual citizens can file legal complaints at the Hague’s International Criminal Court. A group of the hostage families have already filed a war crimes complaint against Hamas leaders for consideration by the prosecutor.²²⁸ In the absence of rape kits (which must be collected within forty-eight hours of attack) Tanya Domi recommends following the pattern instituted in Bosnia thirty years ago to offer survivors a degree of justice and closure: “The state prosecutor’s office should consider exhuming some bodies. This took place in Bosnia, to bring successful rape and sexual assault cases at The Hague. Although DNA can no longer be collected to determine rape, other forensic evidence can be gathered. The state prosecutor should also seek to admit photographs and video of victims who were suspected of having been raped, along with eyewitness testimonies.”²²⁹

Most of the victims were silenced forever. There is, however, substantial evidence that Hamas perpetrated sexual violence and used rape as a weapon of war. We may never know the full extent of sexual violence perpetrated against Kurdish, Yezidi, or Israeli women. The women silenced in these conflicts need the survivors to bear witness, to not forget the victims, and to tell their stories. Most of all, women, wherever they are and regardless of their race, religion, or ethnicity, must be believed.