QADIYA, Iraq — In the moments
before he raped the 12-year-old girl, the Islamic State fighter took the time
to explain that what he was about to do was not a sin. Because the preteen girl
practiced a religion other than Islam, the Quran not only gave him the right to
rape her — it condoned and encouraged it, he insisted.
He bound her hands and gagged
her. Then he knelt beside the bed and prostrated himself in prayer before
getting on top of her.
When it was over, he knelt to
pray again, bookending the rape with acts of religious devotion.
“I kept telling him it hurts
— please stop,” said the girl, whose body is so small an adult could circle her
waist with two hands. “He told me that according to Islam he is allowed to rape
an unbeliever. He said that by raping me, he is drawing closer to God,”
she said in an interview alongside her family in a refugee camp here, to which
she escaped after 11 months of captivity.
The 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. Interviews with
21 women and girls who recently escaped the Islamic State, as well as an
examination of the group’s official communications, illuminate how the practice
has been enshrined in the group’s core tenets.
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