IRAQ today ISIS Tightens
IRAQ today ISIS Tightens Grip on Captives Held as Sex Slaves BY LORI HINNANT, MAYA ALLERUZZO AND BALINT SZLANKO/ASSOCIATED PRESS The advertisement on the Telegram app is as chilling as it is incongruous: A girl for sale is “Virgin. Beautiful. 12 years old. ... Her price has reached ,500 and she will be sold soon.’’ The posting in Arabic appeared on an encrypted conversation along with ads for kittens, weapons and tactical gear. It was shared with The Associated Press by an activist with the minority Yazidi community, whose women and children are being held as sex slaves by the extremists. While the Islamic State group is losing territory in its self-styled caliphate, it is tightening its grip on the estimated 3,000 women and girls held as sex slaves. In a fusion of ancient barbaric practices and modern technology, ISIS sells the women like chattel on smart phone apps and shares databases that contain their photographs and the names of their “owners” to prevent their escape through ISIS checkpoints. The fighters are assassinating smugglers who rescue the captives, just as funds to buy the women out of slavery are drying up. The thousands of Yazidi women and children were taken prisoner in August 2014, when ISIS fighters overran their villages in northern Iraq with the aim to eliminate the Kurdish-speaking minority because of its ancient faith. Since then, Arab and Kurdish smugglers managed to free an average of 134 people a month. But by May, an ISIS crackdown reduced those numbers to just 39 as of July 6, according to figures provided by the Kurdistan regional government. Mirza Danai, founder of the German-Iraqi aid organization Luftbrucke Irak, said in the last two or three months, escape has become more difficult and dangerous. “They register every slave, every person under their owner, and therefore if she escapes, every Daesh control or checkpoint, or security force — they know that this girl ... has escaped from this owner,” he said, using the Arabic acronym for the group. U.S. State Department spokesman John Kirby told the AP that the U.S. continues “to be appalled by credible reports that Daesh is trafficking in human beings, and sex slavery in particular.” “This depravity not only speaks to the degree to which Daesh cheapens life and repudiates the Islamic faith, it also strengthens our resolve to defeat them,” he said. The AP has obtained a batch of 48 head shots of the captives, smuggled out of the IS-controlled region by an escapee, which people familiar with them say are similar to those in the extremists’ slave database and the smartphone apps. Lamiya Aji Bashar tried to flee four times before finally escaping in March, racing to government-controlled territory with Islamic State group fighters in pursuit. A land mine exploded, killing her companions, 8-year-old Almas and Katherine, 20. She never learned their last names. The explosion left Lamiya blind in her right eye, her face scarred by melted skin. Saved by the man who smuggled her out, she counts herself among the lucky. “I managed in the end, thanks to God, I managed to get away from those infidels,” the 18-year-told the AP from a bed at her uncle’s home in the northern Iraqi town of Baadre. “Even if I had lost both eyes, it would have been worth it, because I have survived them.” The Sunni extremists view the Yazidis as barely human. The Yazidi faith combines elements of Islam, Christianity and Zoroastrianism, an ancient Persian religion. Their prewar population in Iraq was estimated around 500,000. Their number today On a chat on the WhatsApp app, an ISIS militant offers a woman and her children for sale for ,700. is unknown. Nadia Mourad, an escapee, has appeared before the U.S. Congress and the European Parliament to appeal for international help. “Daesh is proud of what it’s done to the Yazidis,’’ she said to Parliament. “They are being used has human shields. They are not allowed to escape or flee. Probably they will be assassinated. Where is the world in all this? Where is humanity?’’ ISIS relies on encrypted apps to sell the women and girls, according to an activist who is documenting the transactions and asked not to be named for fear of his safety. The activist showed AP the negotiations for the captives in encrypted conversations as they were occurring in real time. The postings appear primarily on Telegram and on Facebook and WhatsApp to a lesser AP PHOTO BY MAYA ALLERUZZO degree, he said. Both Facebook-owned WhatsApp and Telegram use end-to-end encryption to protect users’ privacy. Both have said they consider protecting private conversations and data paramount, and that they themselves cannot access users’ content. “Telegram is extremely popular in the Middle East, among other regions,’’ said Telegram spokesman Markus Ra. “This, unfortunately, includes the more marginal elements and the broadest law-abiding masses alike.’’ He added the company is committed to prevent abuse of the service and that it routinely removes public channels used by IS. In addition to the posting for the 12-year-old in a group with hundreds of members, the AP viewed an ad on WhatsApp for a mother with a 3-year-old and a 7-month old baby, with a price of ,700. “She wants her owner to sell her,’’ read the posting, followed by a photo. “We have zero tolerance for this type of behavior and disable accounts when provided with evidence of activity that violates our terms. We encourage people to use our reporting tools if they encounter this type of behavior,’’ said Matt Steinfeld, a spokesman for WhatsApp. Some passages of the Quran have been interpreted to condone slavery, which was widespread when the Prophet Muhammed lived. The Quran allows men to have sex with both their wives and “those they possess with their right hands,’’ taken by interpreters to refer to female slaves. By the 19th and early 20th centuries, most Muslim scholars backed the banning of slavery, citing Quranic verses that say freeing them is a blessing. Some hard-liners, however, continued to insist that under Shariah sex slavery must be permitted, though ISIS is the first in the modern era to bring it into organized practice. In the images obtained by AP, many of the women and girls are dressed in finery, some in heavy makeup. All look directly at the camera, standing in front of overstuffed 14 CHALDEAN NEWS AUGUST 2016
AP PHOTO/HADI MIZBAN chairs or brocade curtains in what resembles a shabby hotel ballroom. Some are barely out of elementary school. Not one looks older than 30. One of them is Nazdar Murat, who was about 16 when she was abducted two years ago — one of more than two dozen young women taken away by the extremists in a single day in August 2014. Her father and uncles were among about 40 people killed when IS took over the Sinjar area, the heart of the Yazidi homeland. Inside an immaculately kept tent in a displaced persons camp outside the northern Iraqi town of Dahuk, Nazdar’s mother said her daughter managed to call once, six months ago. “We spoke for a few seconds. She said she was in Mosul,’’ said Murat. “Every time someone comes back, we ask them what happened to her and no one recognizes her. Some people told me she committed suicide.’’ Kurdistan’s regional government had been reimbursing impoverished Yazidi families who paid up to ,000 in fees to smugglers to rescue their relatives, or the ransoms demanded by individual fighters to give up the captives. But the Kurdish regional government no longer has the funds. For the past year, Kurdistan has been mired in an economic crisis brought on by the collapse of oil prices, a dispute with Iraq’s central government over revenues, and the fallout from the war against the Islamic State. Even when ISIS retreats from towns like Ramadi or Fallujah, the missing girls are nowhere to be found. “Rescues are slowing. They’re going to stop. People are running out of money, I have dozens of families who are tens of thousands of dollars in debt,’’ Slater said. “There are still thousands of women and kids in captivity but it’s getting harder and harder to get them out.’’ Salar Salim in Khanke, Lee Keath in Cairo and Desmond Butler in Washington contributed to this report. A man sits amid a makeshift memorial inside a burned mall at the scene of the massive truck bombing. Baghdad Bombing Receives Little Notice Though at least 292 people died from the July 3 car bombing in Baghdad’s central Karradah district, the attack received scant coverage throughout the world, especially compared to the recent killings in Nice, France and Orlando, Florida. Most of the deaths in the Baghdad attack resulted not from the blast itself, but from the ensuing inferno, fed by a tinderbox of shops in two malls filled with clothing and oilbased perfumes for sale and lined with flammable panels, reported the New York Times. It was all worsened by a slow response by firefighters, building code violations — and a lack of water, the Times said. Many of those killed have had to be identified with DNAtesting because their bodies were burned beyond recognition. Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi ordered new security measures in the capital. The bombing on an early Sunday morning, claimed by ISIS, was the deadliest terror attack in Iraq in a year and one of the worst single bombings in more than a decade of war and insurgency. It underscored ISIS’ ability to strike the Iraqi capital despite a string of battlefield losses elsewhere in the country and fueled public anger toward the government. The suicide bomber blew up his explosives-laden vehicle in Baghdad’s mostly Shiite Karada district, a favorite avenue for shoppers — especially during the holy month of Ramadan, with the streets and sidewalks filled with young people and families after they had broken their daylight fast. Hours after the bombing, al-Abadi visited the attack site in Karada, but a furious mob surrounded his convoy, yelling expletives, hurling rocks and shoes and calling him a “thief.’’ In a statement issued later that day, al-Abadi ordered that a scandalridden bomb detection device be pulled from service. He also ordered the reopening of an investigation on the procurement of the British-made electronic wands, called ADE 651s. In 2010, British authorities arrested the director of the British company ATSC Ltd. on fraud charges, prompting Iraqis to open their own investigation into alleged corruption. Iraqi authorities made some arrests, but the investigation went nowhere and the device remained in use. Along with taking away the electronic wand detectors, al-Abadi also ordered that X-ray systems be installed at the entrances of provinces. He demanded the upgrades of the capital’s security belt, increased aerial scanning and stepped-up intelligence efforts. Iraqi and foreign officials have linked the recent increase in ISIS attacks — especially large-scale suicide bombings — with the string of battlefield losses the extremist group has faced over the past year. Iraqi security forces, supported by U.S.-led coalition airstrikes, have retaken the cities of Tikrit, Ramadi and Fallujah. At the height of the extremist group’s power in 2014, ISIS had deprived the government of control of nearly one third of Iraqi territory. Now the militants are estimated to control only 14 percent, according to the prime minister’s office. ISIS still controls Mosul. In Nice, a truck deliberately plowed through a crowd gathered to watch fireworks for Bastille Day, killing 84. The action had not been conclusively linked to ISIS by press time. On June 12, a man who pledged support to ISIS killed 49 people and wounded 53 others inside a gay nightclub in Orlando. Associated Press and The New York Times. AUGUST 2016 CHALDEAN NEWS 15
