ISIS's Surreally Repugnant Treatment of Women
By Guy Benson
TownHall.com
Amid all the Islamic State's atrocities — its massacres of civilians, its beheading of hostages, its pillaging of antiquities — the systematic violence the jihadists have carried out against countless enslaved women and girls never fails to shock. For months now, we've heard appalling testimony from women who escaped the Islamic State's clutches, many of whom endured rape and other hideous acts of violence. Zainab Bangura, the U.N.'s special representative on sexual violence in conflict, recently conducted a tour of refugee camps in the shadow of the conflicts in Syria and Iraq, war-ravaged countries where the Islamic State commands swaths of territory..."They are institutionalizing sexual violence," Bangura said of the Islamic State. "The brutalization of women and girls is central to their ideology."
This is what a true "rape culture" looks like (as does this). The Post reports that an estimated 3,000 to 5,000 women and girls are being held as sex slaves by the terrorist army, with Yazidis (a religious minority perversely considered to be "devil worshipers" by ISIS' demonic degenerates) being treated with particular barbarity. The piece quotes the the UN's Bangura, who documents unimaginable horrors. Fair warning -- this is difficult to read:
After attacking a village, [the Islamic State] 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 and are sent to Raqqa, the IS stronghold. There is a hierarchy: sheikhs get first choice, then emirs, 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. At slave auctions, buyers haggle fiercely, driving down prices by disparaging girls as flat-chested or unattractive. We heard about one girl who was traded 22 times, and another, who had escaped, told us that the sheikh who had captured her wrote his name on the back of her hand to show that she was his "property" … They commit rape, sexual slavery, forced prostitution and other acts of extreme brutality. We heard one case of a 20-year-old girl who was burned alive because she refused to perform an extreme sex act. We learned of many other sadistic sexual acts. We struggled to understand the mentality of people who commit such crimes.
In addition to its revolting abuse of women and girls, ISIS is busy conquering territory across two countries, solidifying its presence in a third, and seizing control of priceless antiquities, which they tend to destroy, out of a zealous, nihilistic anti-aestethicism. They're also summarily executing innocent people by the hundreds, including children:
When ISIS captures a city, the bloodshed is hardly over, as the militants summarily execute captive fighters and residents by the dozens. In Syria, they have killed more than 250 of them in less than two weeks. At least 13 of the victims were children, said the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Syrian expat watch group. As ISIS has taken control of the Syrian city of Palmyra in the last 10 days, it has executed 217 people there and in other towns caught in the military campaign, SOHR said...Beheading was the preferred method of their execution.
Sickeningly, the brutal murder of children isn't unusual for this Islamist horde. As ISIS 'inches closer' to the Iraqi capital, CNN reports that the mood is darkening in Baghdad:
The "good" news is that locals doubt Baghdad will fall to ISIS -- not because of popular confidence in Iraq's security forces, but because Iran won't allow it. The White House said last week that President Obama's ISIS strategy is an overall success.