The group ISIS has been wreaking havoc across the Middle East recently, with no signs of stopping. Their latest demand is sure to send fury throughout the civilized world – “hand over your daughters for sex jihad, or else.”
The call for what, in any other context, would be called rape or human sex trafficking has been issued in the Iraqi cities of Mosul and Tikrit. But ISIS, the militant Islamist group “the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria,” has sanctioned the concept as a religious dogma, “jihad al-nikah” or sex jihad, demanded to prove faithfulness by “offering” sex to the male fighters as their offering of jihad.
The consequences of refusal to submit to sex jihad are beatings or death, reports the Mirror . The jihad al-nikah often incorporates beatings and transference to many different men for all sorts of sexual acts. Leaflets distributed in the Iraqi cities tell families that they must hand over their daughters for sex jihad, and that “ t hose that refuse to do so are violating God’s will.”
The Clarion Project reports that posters have been put up in public places in Mosul, the second largest Iraqi city, which read:
“We call upon the people of this county to bring their unmarried girls so they can fulfill their duty in sex jihad for their warrior brothers in the city and anyone who will not appear will feel the full force of the sharia [Islamic law] upon him.”
The basis for sex jihad, with girls as young as 14, is a fatwa reportedly issued by Saudi cleric Sheikh Mohammad al-Arifi last year, reports The Blaze. Other sources report that the cleric issued no such fatwa, but Tunisian officials have made public appearances decrying the practice, which they say has led to a number of Tunisian girls becoming sex trafficking victims.
The Islamic Supreme Council of America defines a fatwa as “an Islamic legal pronouncement, issued by an expert in religious law (mufti), pertaining to a specific issue, usually at the request of an individual or judge to resolve an issue where Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh), is unclear.” Thus, the radicals in the ISIS organization have taken the pronouncement permitting jihad al-nikah (jihad of legal copulation ) very seriously, whether or not it was actually ordered by a Muslim cleric. And women and girls in Iraq are paying the high price.
Some ISIS jihadists are not waiting for the girls to report for sex jihad duty, and have reportedly been on a terror campaign in Mosul, going door-to-door killing men and raping women, forcing them into jihad al-nikah.
The Clarion Project reports that an Iraqi television station, Al-Iraqiya TV , interviewed two sisters who were hospitalized after being repeatedly raped by armed ISIS men, who killed the men at the house and then took turns raping them.
“They came into the house. They were disgusting. They were armed and spoke among themselves in a language we did not recognize. We were afraid; I tried to save my sister, but one of them hit me with his weapon – on my body and then on my face – me and my sister. I blacked out and woke up to the sound the sounds of the screaming of my neighbor while one of the jihadis was playing with my hair.”
Her sister told reporters, “I heard one of them speaking in a dialect from the Gulf region and the other one was speaking in a language I have never heard before. I kept resisting and he hit me on my head. I woke up and saw that my entire body was covered in blood.”
A Baghdad University lecturer, Nasser Kataw, condemns the practice of jihad al-nikah. He told The Mirror that the sex jihad goes “against all the teachings of Islam. They think the rape of women in this way is some kind of sexual jihad. It is not. It is a war crime.”
Many women have fled the region, and more have reportedly been kidnapped by the ISIS militants, presumably so that they can fulfill their perceived religious duty as sex slaves for the sex jihad.
[images via bing and The Clarion Project ]