The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) has employed sexual violence against women and men in a terroristic manner. Sexual violence, as defined by The World Health Organization includes “any sexual act, attempt to obtain a sexual act, unwanted sexual comments or advances, or acts to traffic, or otherwise directed, against a person’s sexuality using coercion, by any person regardless of their relationship to the victim, in any setting, including but not limited to home and work.” ISIL has used sexual violence to undermine a sense of security within communities, and to raise funds through the sale of captives into sexual slavery.
Background
There is a history of sexual violence, especially when inflicted by the state, in modern Iraq. After the 1979 Iranian revolution, Saddam Hussein interned and deported 40,000 Iraqis of Shia faith. Many of these families were subjected to rape and torture while in internment camps. During the Iran–Iraq War, Iraqi secret police would sexually assault prisoners and video tape it. During the Anfal campaign, Saddam's troops raped Kurdish women. After the Gulf war, sanctions against Iraq crippled the economy and incapacitated the government; women were abducted in Baghdad and sold into sexual slavery.
The 2003 invasion of Iraq dismantled Iraqi security forces, resulting in a "tidal wave" of sexual violence. Between 2003 and 2006, upto 3,500 Iraqi women disappeared, many feared to have been sold into sexual slavery. As de-baathification disempowered Sunnis, many Sunni women turned prostitution to survive. Under US administration, Abu Ghraib prison continued be used for sexual abuse of prisoners. Given the prison's international attention after US control, "the Islamic State of Iraq obsessively referenced the 2005 Abu Ghraib scandal to justify their gendered violence and deflect criticism of their abuses." After US withdrawal, Iraqi and Kurdish security forces continued the sexual violence of their predecessors; Human Rights Watch documented sexual assaults of women (especially Sunni women), sometimes in front of their husbands or children.
Stated justification
In October 2014, in its digital magazine Dabiq, ISIL explicitly claimed religious justification for enslaving Yazidi women. Specifically, ISIL argued that the Yazidi were idol worshipers and appealed to the shariah practice of spoils of war. ISIL asserts that certain Hadith and Qur’anic verses support their right to enslave and rape captive non-Muslim women. ISIL appealed to apocalyptic beliefs and "claimed justification by a Hadith that they interpret as portraying the revival of slavery as a precursor to the end of the world." Further justification has been stated that "according to ISIS doctrine, these acts were permissible towards non-believers who refused to accede to Islam. By Islamic law, then, the women were concubines and the spoils of a jihad." The Islamic State as an organizational entity is said to have "adopted certain forms of sexual violence, including sexual slavery and child marriage, defining who could be targeted, and regulating the conditions under which such violence could be perpetrated." According to Dabiq, "enslaving the families of the kuffar and taking their women as concubines is a firmly established aspect of the Sharia’s that if one were to deny or mock, he would be denying or mocking the verses of the Qur'an and the narration of the Prophet … and thereby apostatizing from Islam." In late 2014 ISIL released a pamphlet that focused on the treatment of female slaves. It says fighters are allowed to have sex with adolescent girls and to beat slaves as discipline. The pamphlet's guidelines also allow fighters to trade slaves, including for sex, as long as they have not been impregnated by their owner. Charlie Winter, a researcher at the counter-extremist think tank Quilliam, described the pamphlet as "abhorrent". It is further stated that "it is permissible to beat the female slave as a form of disciplinary beating, but is forbidden to beat for the purpose of achieving gratification or for torture." The New York Times said in August 2015 that "[t]he systematic rape of women and girls from the Yazidi religious minority has become deeply enmeshed in the organization and the radical theology of the Islamic State in the year since the group announced it was reviving slavery as an institution." It is evident that "the fact that IS appeared to tolerate and did not punish – to our knowledge – instances of gang rape of Yazidi women indicates that this pattern was a practice."