The Complete Infidel's Guide to ISIS (35 page)

To potential recruits, she emphasizes their duty as Muslims: “To those who are able and can still make your way, hasten hasten to our lands . . . This is a war against Islam and it is known that either ‘you’re with them or with us’. So pick a side.”
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Aqsa warns, however, that girls who follow in her footsteps will baffle and grieve their more secular-minded parents: “How does a parent who has little Islamic knowledge and understanding comprehend why their son or daughter has left their well-off life, education and a bright future behind to go live in a war-torn country. Most likely they will blame themselves, they will think they have done something. But until they truly understand from the bottom of their heart that you have done this action sincerely for Allah’s sake they will live in hope that you will
return.”
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Aqsa emphasized that although she missed her own mother, she would not go home.

The Sex Slaves

Nor will most of the non-Muslim women that the Islamic State has taken captive.

In line with the Qur’anic permission to Muslim men to enjoy the sexual favors of the “captives of the right hand,” the Islamic State captured three thousand non-Muslim Iraqi women—Yazidis and Christians—in the summer of 2014, and forced them into sex slavery.

These unfortunate women and girls were looked after by the all-female al-Khansa Brigade. Female Muslims from Britain who were part of the Islamic State’s police apparatus were given the responsibility of supervising the de facto brothels where the captives were forced to live and work.
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In April 2015, the Islamic State sold 216 Yazidi captives, including fifty-five boys and girls, back to non-Muslim humanitarian aid workers. Once freed, many began to give the details of what they had been through. Ziyad Shammo Aladany, an aid worker for an organization devoted to assisting Yazidis, explained that the boys as well as the girls had been “distributed among houses” in two cities that the Islamic State controlled, Mosul and Tal Afar. “They were treated very badly,” said Shammo. “The girls were dragged away from their mothers. If the mothers pleaded them not to give away their daughters, they were beaten and tortured.”

Then they were “forced to convert to Islam and pray, and say the Shahada [the Islamic profession of faith]. They also gave them lectures about Islam.” After that, some of the girls were given to Islamic State jihadis, sometimes after ISIS victories, as the spoils of war.

“A lot of them,” said Shammo, “have been sold to ISIS fighters, they have been raped in . . . public, and by more than two or three people at a time. They were tortured, beaten and subject to any type of violence.”
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One nineteen-year-old Yazidi woman who escaped after being a captive of the Islamic State for four months told a horrific story. She was captured when the Islamic State invaded the Kurdish city of Sinjar. When the Islamic State jihadis entered her house, she recalled, “My mother started screaming and begging for mercy as the Daesh (Isis) fighters told my sister and me to join the group of younger women specially selected. But they tore us from her grasp. I saw other women in the building being dragged out to waiting lorries by their hair.”

The men were separated from the woman, and the married women from the unmarried. “The Daesh took our names and ages and noted everything down. It was organised and they took us away like cattle.” Among the Islamic State jihadis were some men she recognized from her town: “A local mechanic was among them. The Sunni men in our area became Daesh as soon as they got a smell of them approaching. No one even had to ask them to join.”

She was then given to an Islamic State member and raped repeatedly—and then sold to another. Amid physical and mental abuse, she was forced to convert to Islam.
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The father of one girl who escaped said, “We had no hope. We knew thousands of women had been sold.”
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Slave auctions went on for days, as girls were sold for as little as $15, and some of those who were being offered for sale attempted suicide; several were successful. One girl who was sold
to an Islamic State jihadi was taken by him to a home where his other sex slaves were waiting. When the new girl told him she had a husband, he beat her.
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According to Islamic law, when an infidel woman is taken captive, her previous marriage is immediately annulled.

Another escapee recalled that at an auction of sex slaves, the girls all wept, and the men “were very happy.” She was sold in Raqqa, and then also repeatedly raped and beaten.
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Seeing no other way out of her situation, she tried suicide several times—to the disgust of her captors, who then promptly sold her to other jihadis. The girls’ captors emphasized that the slavery was all about religion: “We said we are human beings. They said, ‘You are our property.’ They said, ‘You are infidels. We will do what we want with you.’”

The Islamic State jihadis preferred younger girls—the younger, the better: “They raped girls who were nine or ten or even eight. They said they preferred the young ones. They would say the older ones know a few things, the young ones know nothing.”
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One Yazidi woman described the house of horrors in a building in Syria where approximately sixty women were held as slaves: “From 9:30 in the morning, men would come to buy girls to rape them. I saw in front of my eyes ISIS soldiers pulling hair, beating girls, and slamming the heads of anyone who resisted. They were like animals. . . . Once they took the girls out, they would rape them and bring them back to exchange for new girls. The girls’ ages ranged from 8 to 30 years . . . only 20 girls remained in the end.”
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The Deserters

It is not surprising, given how enamored the Islamic State is with blood, death, and destruction, that some of those who make their way to it with high ideals of living in the caliphate quickly become disillusioned.

In December 2014, ISIS jihadis in their Raqqa capital executed a hundred men for desertion. A local opponent of the group claimed that inside the Islamic State, “Morale isn’t falling—it’s hit the ground.” He said that the disillusionment was besetting both the native jihadis and the foreigners: “Local fighters are frustrated—they feel they’re doing most of the work and the dying . . . foreign fighters who thought they were on an adventure are now exhausted.”
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The situation had so deteriorated in Raqqa that the Islamic State had given some military policemen the sole task of punishing jihadis who failed to perform their assigned duties. According to opponents of ISIS in Raqqa, four hundred jihadis had been arrested by November 2014.
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It is not known what happened to them after that, but given the nature of the regime, it is unlikely that they are still alive.

A rare former Islamic State fighter who successfully escaped was Abu Almouthanna, a twenty-seven-year-old from Syria. He said he had been tortured by the Assad regime, which had also killed his family, and “when your family has been killed, you will want to kill, too.” He first joined the Free Syrian Army (FSA), the group that both the Obama administration and Republican leaders such as John McCain had touted as the “moderates” who were going to save Syria from both Assad and the Islamic State. Then he joined Jabhat al-Nusra Front, the al-Qaeda affiliate that al-Qaeda leader Zawahiri had demanded that the Islamic State yield to in Syria.

After the Islamic State soundly defeated Jabhat al-Nusra in battle, Almouthanna and two thousand of his comrades joined the winning side. “I was happy to move to ISIS. They had the most money and the best weapons,” he explained. “Other than that they were just the same.”

He was sent to an Islamic State boot camp, where foreign jihadis trained him. He bunked with two Muslims from France and one from Britain who
did little outside of training but study the Qur’an and boast of their coming exploits for Allah: “From Day One, they joked about cutting heads and making the enemy pay.”

Almouthanna fought for the Islamic State for a little over a year. He had no trouble killing civilians, he said: “They were all enemies.” He participated in public beheadings in town squares, with the townsfolk watching agog as the jihadis fought over who would have the privilege of actually performing the beheading. They vied for this privilege, Almouthanna said, because cutting off an infidel’s head “brings them closer to Allah.” After the fighting and beheading, slave women would cook dinner for the jihadis, and the camaraderie was close.

The brutality was not what led to Almouthanna’s ultimate disenchantment; what led him to flee the group was a bloody battle with Jabhat al-Nusra that made Almouthanna realize that he was no longer fighting Assad, but instead spending all his time fighting against his fellow jihadis. He made it out of the Islamic State’s domains successfully, but the stakes should he be recognized and captured are high: “The punishment for leaving is death.”
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