The Islamic State never ceases to shock with its brutalities, and its deplorable treatment of women has once again come to light, with a UN envoy revealing that Isis even burned a woman alive for refusing to participate in an 'extreme sex act'.
Zainab Bangura, who heads a United Nations team investigating sex crimes in war zones, has revealed how Isis fighters engage in sexual brutalisation of women and girls after they seize their villages.
"After attacking a village, IS 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," the UN envoy told the Middle East Eye, a regional news website.
Bangura said that Isis fighters often engage in sadistic sexual acts, and kill those who refuse to participate.
"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," said Bangura, who gathered the data after travelling to Syria, Iraq, Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan.
Isis' slave market is an organised, systematic institution, in which girls are picked by Isis members in descending order of their rankings, raped for days, and then sent back to the slave market.
"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," Bangura revealed.
"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'," she added.
Another disturbing trend in the Islamic State territories that Bangura revealed was that of 'sexual jihad'.
"We were also informed of parents who had given away their daughters to IS, particularly in Mosul. To understand this, we must examine the concept of jihad al-nikah, or sexual jihad – whereby women's bodies are used as part of supporting the IS campaign," she explained.
Bangura also highlighted how Isis brutalised women who tried to escape or kill themselves, and would release girls for hefty ransom amounts of up to $5,000.
The UN envoy said that apart from a military campaign, it was necessary to "suffocate" the Islamic State's access to communication through social media and to cut their economic supply.
Isis is said to have enslaved up to 5,000 women in the past year, mostly Yazidi girls, with even children not being spared.
