Brutality Against Women

Islam is said to permit treating non‑Muslim women as war captives and using or selling them as sex slaves

“I carry the wounds of 74 genocides and the lifelong burden of a million years of tears… I am the easy paved road to someone else’s paradise. I apologize to the one who killed me — if he (even after killing me) fails to reach paradise!”
– Haji Mershabi, Ezidi I Am

After the rise of the extremist group ISIS in the Middle East in 2014, one of the most brutal and systematic ethnic cleansing campaigns in history was carried out against the Kurdish population of Syria and Iraq. Because of the Kurds’ secular political ideology, their distinct culture, and their strong resistance against the extremist ideology of Islamic jihadists, the jihadists identified the Kurds as their primary enemy. And according to their interpretation of Islam, they were the infidels of that region. With the intention of completely annihilating them, jihadist militants launched one military operation after another in Kurdish-populated areas and began committing medieval-style atrocities on ordinary civilians.

The greatest victims of this brutality were the Yazidis of the Sinjar region of Iraq, who are ethnically Kurdish and belong to an ancient religious minority community. In August 2014, Islamic fighters launched a sudden attack on Sinjar, lined up several thousand innocent Yazidi men, shot them dead, and buried them in mass graves. At the same time, they abducted nearly seven thousand Yazidi women and children, whom the jihadists later distributed among themselves as “spoils of war,” exactly as described in their interpretation of Islam. They raped the women and children for days without food and later sold them in open markets as sex slaves, subjecting them to extreme torture. Children and elderly women who were not sexually desirable and could not be sold were buried alive in mass graves.

Alongside Iraq, Islamic jihadist forces also attacked the Kurds of Syria, the most prominent example being the siege of the Kurdish-majority city of Kobani. Under heavy weapons and artillery fire, the jihadists turned the entire city into rubble and entered surrounding villages, capturing countless civilians and publicly beheading them. To escape this horrific massacre, more than two hundred thousand Syrian Kurdish civilians were forced overnight to cross the border into Turkey as refugees.

The jihadists not only killed Kurds but also imposed a complete ban on Kurdish culture, language, and clothing in the areas under their control, carrying out a form of cultural genocide — something Islamists have historically done in many regions. They forcibly seized Kurdish homes and property and distributed them among foreign jihadist fighters who had come from different parts of the world. Additionally, any ordinary Kurdish citizen who refused to accept the extremist caliphate’s rules and allegiance was labeled an infidel, an enemy of Islam, or an apostate, and was publicly hanged or slaughtered in town squares.

Amid this bloody crisis, when the Kurdish women’s armed forces (YPJ) began fighting bravely on the front lines against the jihadist forces, the jihadists became even more violent toward Kurdish women. If any Kurdish female fighter was captured on the battlefield, she was subjected to extreme and grotesque torture. Yet, in the face of this horrific persecution and existential threat, the Kurdish Peshmerga and resistance forces did not back down. With the support of the U.S.-led international coalition, they fought the hardest ground battles against the Islamic fighters and ultimately played the key role in bringing about the complete collapse of the territorial caliphate seized in the name of Islam in Syria and Iraq.

The photo shows a staged performance or street play organized in London in 2014 by Kurdish activists, where they depicted the treatment of women under Islamist forces. This demonstration was organized by a group called “Compassion 4 Kurdistan” to raise public awareness about the atrocities committed by jihadists. The individuals seen in the photo are actors or participants in that street performance.