According to eyewitnesses reporting to ARA News, last Thursday, a group of members in the extremist Islamic State (ISIS) publicly burned alive 19 women who refused to have sex with them. The victims were supposedly contained in iron cages in Mosul, in the Yezidi region of Iraq, with hundreds of onlookers nearby.
This northern area of Iraq has been under ISIS control since 2014. Since the beginning of the occupation, Human Rights Watch (HRW) has stated that thousands of Yezidi civilians have been taken captive by the extremist jihadists. Many of those taken have been young women separated from their family and forced into marriages and to have sexual relations with their captors.
Skye Wheeler of HRW published an extensive report in April of 2016 on women who have escaped the horrific situation; however, she cites the number of those who remain prisoners of ISIS to be around 2000. HRW has consistently urged the organization to release their captive citizens and end the harrowing violence against women taking place in the Yezidi region since the conquest of the territory. The claimed burning of these 19 women at the beginning of the month is, unfortunately, one incident in a long list of detestable gendered crimes committed by the militants of ISIS.
You can find Wheeler’s full report on victim trauma and the situation for women who have experienced life under ISIS in the Yezidi region of Northern Iraq here.
Image via Youtube.
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