One woman has visited the refugee camps that are now the homes of women terrorised by ISIS. Today she shared the harrowing stories of these women to encourage the world to act.
Trigger warning: This post contains details of sexual abuse and violence.
Zainab Bangura has travelled the world researching the lives of women in regions ravaged by war and violence. As the UN’s Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict it’s how she makes her living.
Bangura has been to the Congo, Bosnia, Colombia, central Africa, but says she has never witnessed horror like that inflicted on female captives of the Islamic State.
“ISIL use sexualised violence and the brutalisation of women as part of the key strategy in dealing with this conflict,” Ms Bangura told ABC Radio National this morning.
She emphasised that violence against women is systematic. It is routine, it is the norm, and degradation and abuse is purposeful and strategic.
Bangura said the trafficking and sale of women is vital in funding the Islamic State, and ISIS is luring recruits on the promise they will be given virgins — often children — to marry or keep as slaves.
“Most important [to keep in mind] is the sophistication with which ISIS is handling this issue,” she said.
“They’re using it as a means of recruitment, to entice young people that they want to bring into the conflict in Syria and Iraq. They’re using it as part of their fundraising strategy, selling the girls in open markets and demanding ransom from the families of the girls, and they are trafficking the girls.”
She told the story of a girl who managed to escape ISIS. When the girl was first abducted she was held in a house with 100 other girls, where men would come and bid to buy them.
A Sheikh was the first to make his bid.
He selected a 15-year-old girl and stamped her hand as a sign of his ownership.
He then took her home and raped her.
“The nights he was raping her he came with a gun and a stick and said ‘do you want me to rape you or can I use the stick or the gun?'” Ms Bangura recounted.
“The girl said I’d rather you use the gun. He said ‘I didn’t buy you to kill you.’
“And he raped her for six months, every week.”
After the man was done, he sold her to someone else, from whom she escaped.
This case is not isolated.
Bangura has met women who have been sold four or five times, the details and experiences of whom she says she can’t repeat.
She says women are traded and sold like cattle.
“When they [ISIS captors] are ready to sell them they take them out into the open market,” she says. “They strip them naked and ask people to value them. And then people will negotiate the prices.”
Bangura wants to remind the world that the Islamic State is “not an ordinary enemy.”
She believes the key to defeat is cutting off the finances — because they are conducting trade, which, clearly, others are buying — and prioritise the suffocation of IS’ political, military and economic life force.
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