Recruiting tools
http://total.kz/politics/2014/04/27/v_gruzii_vedetsya_verbovka_naemn
IS Militants Use Sex to Lure
Recruits
by Matthew Hilburn
December 20, 2014
Fighters join the
so-called Islamic State [IS] for myriad motives, but one big reason might be
the lure of one of the most basic human desires: sex.
"The offer of
access to sex is part of the Islamic State's recruitment strategy," said
Jytte Klausen, a professor at Brandeis University and the founder of the
Western Jihadism Project which monitors IS activities. "It has to be
assumed that it works. Many young and not-so-young men in the Middle East and
Africa, and beyond, live under circumstances where it is not possible for them
to set up independent households and family lives."
In a gruesome example of
just how seriously IS takes the availability of sex as a lure for would-be
fighters, the group recently published an online guide on the treatment of sex
slaves.
According to a
translation from Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), a U.S.-based
non-profit monitoring militant online activity, some of the rules in the guide
include permitting men to engage in sexual intercourse with "captive"
females, permitting the sale of a female captive, and perhaps most chilling,
permitting a man "to have intercourse with the female slave who hasn't
reached puberty if she is fit for intercourse."
Klausen said sex and
forced marriage are IS recruiting tools. She cites poverty, displacement and
the breakdown of traditional capabilities for the arrangement of marriages to
having contributed to the "creation of hundreds of thousands, perhaps even
millions, of transient single men."
"Revolutions have
always drawn on such men for fuel," she said. "The Islamic State
clearly hopes to attract them as part of its colonization strategy."
Mia Bloom, a criminology
professor at the University of Massachusetts Lowell's Center for Terrorism and
Security Studies, said the sex lure is more than a recruiting tool.
"A lot of the
fighters know that if they go to [IS], they are guaranteed a wife, or more than
one," she said. "It's also about retention so they don't leave."
Bloom added that
recruitment consists of a combination of "worldly and other-worldly
incentives."
According to a September
UN report on human rights abuses by IS, it "received a number of reports
that an office for the sale of abducted women was opened in the al-Quds area of
Mosul city."
"Women and girls
are brought with price tags for the buyers to choose and negotiate the
sale," the report said. "The buyers were said to be mostly youth from
the local communities. Apparently [IS] was 'selling' these Yazidi women to the
youth as a means of inducing them to join their ranks."
The Yazidi minority of
northern Iraq came under furious IS attack in the summer, with thousands of
women and girls reportedly taken captive.
Matthew Barber, a
doctoral student at the University of Chicago who is studying the Yazidi, was
in Iraq when the community was besieged. In interviews with survivors, he said
he discovered that thousands of women and girls had been taken prisoner by IS.
In an interview posted
on YouTube, Barber said the capture of so many women and girls was no accident.
"Over time, it
became clear that it was a sexually motivated campaign to take large numbers of
concubines, to take Yazidi women and place them in jihadi homes basically as
domestic servants/sex slaves," he said.
He said there were
credible reports that the first wave of IS fighters attacking the Yazidi came
with empty trucks specifically to ship off women and girls.
IS first denied these
reports, but later said they were true and provided what they said was
religious justification for their actions.
That justification,
according to Barber, is that they believe that having justified and available
sexual alternatives to their wives will allow them to maintain sexual purity.
"What is clear is
that fighters are rewarded for their efforts in jihad with women given to them
as gifts by the IS," he wrote in an email.
The practice is not
isolated to northern Iraq.
Writing in the Wall
Street Journal, Haleh Esfandiari , the director of the Middle East program at
the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, said that in IS-occupied
Syria, there was "a photo of a line of women, covered from head to toe and
tied to one another by a rope, as they were being led to a makeshift slave
market."
"To the men of
[IS], women are an inferior race, to be enjoyed for sex and be discarded, or to
be sold off as slaves," she wrote.
Numerous reports
indicate IS operates brothels in Syria and Iraq.
'Some [women are] sold
to individual men, others are kept by [IS] in rest houses and face multiple
rapes by fighters returning from the battlefield,' wrote Valerie Amos, the
United Nation's Undersecretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency
Relief Coordinator, in a report earlier this month.
She warned more violence
against women was likely.
'Recently, Kurdish
refugees from Kobani reported the capture of young girls by [IS] for sexual
purposes," she wrote. "Girls as young as twelve.
'Reports of early and
forced marriage are also on the rise. This is in part due to a depletion of
family resources, and more recently because parents are terrified of their
unmarried daughters being forced to marry [Islamic State] fighters in areas
under their control,' she said.
And for women and girls
who refuse to become sex slaves, the consequences are brutal.
The Jerusalem Post
reported this week that IS fighters killed 150 women and underage girls for
refusing to perform sex acts with IS fighters.
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