Islamic State: Where sex-slave depravity masquerades as faith

The uncomfortable question for the Western world is why debased sex-slave appeals seem to be gaining traction with IS’s target audience.

One of Mohamed Elomar’s Yazidi slaves.

“Don’t worry brothers, she won’t dissappoint you,’’ Australian jihad­ist Mohamed Elomar declared in his misspelled tweet, posted with an image of the young captive with sad and tortured eyes.

She was almost certainly Yazidi, one of seven slaves of Islamic State he claimed to have for sale for $2500 each. We don’t know what happened to her, whether Elomar got his price, and probably never will after the former Sydney­sider was reported this week to have been killed. But the brutal intent was all too apparent.

The twice-married Elomar, 29, was reaching out to young Muslims to join him in the combat zone in Syria and Iraq and enjoy the same spoil of war: sex. The inconvenient truth for the professed puritans of Islamic State is that the prospect of “guilt-free sex’’ has moved up on the list of attractions promoted in their slick, multi-dimensi­oned recruiting online and through social media.

The uncomfortable questions for the Western world, including Australia, are why this debased appeal seems to be gaining traction with Islamic State’s target audience, which increasingly includes women, and why it’s not challenged more stridently in the public arena.

In an internet chat room recently, monitored by US researchers covertly keeping tabs on a presumed Islamic State recruiter, the discussion was explicit about the earthly pleasures available to young men who got into the fight.

“They were promised a girl would be provided for them to marry, she would be pretty, and they be given a home to live in,’’ said one member of the team, speaking on condition of anony­mity. “There were direct questions about when there would be sex. They were told, ‘as soon as you like’.’’

Similar Q&A sessions have been logged on the notorious web platform Ask.fm, as well as the plethora of encrypted messaging sites that are used by Islamic State operatives to reel in recruits.

The pitch to young women is more nuanced, but the obligations are clearly understood. Islam­ic State propaganda plays heavily on “romantic notions of adventure and finding romance in the form of a husband or wife’’, according to British academics Erin Marie Saltman and Melanie Smith, writing for London’s Institute for Strategic Dialogue on the gender factor in jihad.

“The sense of adventure in leaving home to travel is influential particularly for the young women,’’ they write. “The other adventure is one based on the promise of meaningful romance as a prize for making the journey.’’

Jytte Klausen of Boston’s Brandeis University calls it a “very professionally run deception scheme’’. She told The Weekend Australian: “It is of course completely in violation of Islamic religious law to lure young people away in marriage and to fight without parental consent … this particular trick appeals to the incipie­nt desire of teenagers to be validated in their thinking that they are right and their parents just plainly not with it.’’

Another notorious Australian jihadi, Khaled Sharrouf, was reported to have died by Elomar’s side when their convoy was taken out by an airstrike in Raqqa, the capital of the so-called caliphate in Syria. Sharrouf was more than his friend and mentor: they were family. Elomar had married Sharrouf’s 14-year-old daughter, Zaynab, after his first wife was intercepted with their three children while trying to join him.

Together, they formed the nucleus of what Saltman and Smith identified as an Australian “sub-cluster’’ within Islamic State, a crucible for exploiting women under the guise of sharia.

When Elomar boasted last December about his slave girls, Islam­ic State was still on a roll, having seized vast tracts of territ­ory in southern Syria and northern Iraq in the breakout that put it on the map. The Yazidis had paid a particularly terrible price.

Long persecuted because some of their beliefs derived from the Bible, they were branded devil worshippers by the Islamists and systematically rounded up. Up to 5000 Yazidi men were murdered and at least that number of women enslaved, the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights estimated.

The accounts of what happened to them are horrifying. Human Rights Watch, a non-government organisation, issued a report in April detailing the systematic rape and torture of young women and girls, based on interviews with some who had escaped the clutches of Islamic State.

Jalila, 12, described how she was beaten and dragged away by a gunman. “I told him not to touch me and begged him to let me go,’’ she said. “I told him to take me to my mother. I was a young girl, and I asked him: ‘What do you want from me?’ He spent three days having sex with me.”

Dilara, 20, was taken to a wedding hall and held with about 60 other terrified Yazidi women and children. “From 9.30 in the morning men would come to buy girls to rape them … they were like animals … they would rape them and bring them back to exchange for new girls. The girls’ ages ranged from eight to 30 years … only 20 girls remained in the end.”

Wafa, 12, was told by an older fighter she could trust him; she was “like a daughter’’ to him and wasn’t to be afraid. Soon enough, he raped her. “He was sleeping in the same place with me and … one day I woke up and my legs were covered in blood,’’ the child said.

Islamic State has sought to justify the sexual violence by claiming that Islam permits sex with non-Muslim “slaves”.

At least 3000 Yazidis remain in captivity alongside members of other persecuted minorities, Human Rights Watch believes.

Girls of nine are known to have been violated, a fact chilling­ly acknowledged in an Islamic State field manual that licenses its men to “have intercourse with the female slave who hasn’t reached puberty if she is fit for (it)’’.

The UN’s special envoy on sexual violence in conflict, Zainab Bangura, revealed earlier this month that women could be bought in the slave markets of Raqqa province for the price of a packet of cigarettes. “This is how they attract young men — ‘we have women waiting (for) you, virgins that you can marry’,’’ she told news service AFP.

Klausen, the founding profes­sor of the well-regarded Western Jihad Project, however, insists the proposition that the typical Islam­ic State recruit is an alienated nerd who can’t meet girls doesn’t fly. “Many of the young men have had plenty of girlfriends before they left for IS,’’ she said. “It is, in my view, more important that IS gives them a salary, a house when they marry and they can have children. The inability to set up independent households is a huge social problem across Africa, Asia and also in Europe’s expensive cities.’’

Greg Barton, a professor at the Global Terrorism Research Centre at Monash University, said Islami­c State offered a way for young Muslims to have “their sexual needs met without feeling guilty about it’’. Like just about everything else, the ghanimah system of distributing war booty, including subjugated women, is run on tight hierarchical lines.

The top rung of the male leadership, the emirs, get the first pick of captives, followed by unit commanders and the rank-and-file fighters. The women of Islamic State also receive their cut of the spoils with wedding gifts and living allowances.

And, yes, sex once they are married, though not necessarily to a man of their liking. “In the case of women who come from sheltered families, the promise of legit sex may be as much of the draw as the promise to the guys that they will ‘be somebody’ and become a ‘lion’,’’ Klausen said.

One jihad bride, calling herself Umm Layth, told a British research team: “Honestly, there is something so pleasurable to know that what you have has been taken off the kuffar (non-believer­s) and handed to you personally by Allah.’’

Foreign Minister Julie Bishop has said up to 500 foreign women were with Islamic State in the Middle-East war zone, though none was allowed to fight, owing to sharia strictures. By the estim­ate of Saltman and Smith of the Institute for Strategic Dialogue the intermarried knot of Australian women numbers about 20.

If Elomar is dead — and there’s every chance he is — his teenaged wife has joined the ranks of jihad widows whose availability is also used as recruitment bait by Islamic State.

Zaynab was barely 13 when her father moved the family to Syria and made his mark by having one of her brothers pose for gruesome photographs with a severed human head. She professes to have no regrets. “Chillin in the khilafah, lovin life,” the teenager tweeted in March, together with a photograph of five veiled women reclining against what appeared to be Sharrouf’s new BMW.

The hypocrisy of the scene seems to have escaped her. Yet she shows a distinct awareness of the atrocities committed by Islam­ic state against the Yazidis and would have been mindful of what Elomar was up to with the slave girls. Whether he did anything more than try to sell them is something else we may never know; what can be said with certainty is that he would have been prosecuted in Australia for taking a bride as young as Zaynab.

She will have the regula­tion period of iddah — four months, 10 days — to mourn, then be expected to remarry, just as her friend, Zehra Duman, from Melbourne, was after husband Mahmoud Abdullatif, also from Melbourne, died in Syria in January.