ISIS rules who can have sex with ‘slaves’

Islamic State (ISIS) theologians have issued an extremely detailed ruling on when “owners” of women enslaved by the extremist group can have sex with them, in an apparent bid to curb what they called violations in the treatment of captured females.

The ruling or fatwa has the force of law and appears to go beyond the ISIS’ previous known utterances on the subject, a leading ISIS scholar said.

It sheds new light on how the group is trying to reinterpret centuries-old teachings to justify the sexual slavery of women in the swaths of Syria and Iraq it controls. The fatwa was among a huge trove of documents captured by US Special Operations Forces during a raid targeting a top ISIS official in Syria in May.

Among the religious rulings are bans on a father and son having sex with the same female slave; and the owner of a mother and daughter having sex with both. Joint owners of a female captive are similarly enjoined from intercourse because she is viewed as “part of a joint ownership”.

The United Nations and human rights groups have accused the ISIS of the systematic abduction and rape of thousands of women and girls as young as 12, especially members of the Yazidi minority in northern Iraq. Many have been given to fighters as a reward or sold as sex slaves.

Far from trying to conceal the practice, the ISIS has boasted about it and established a department of “war spoils” to manage slavery.

In an April report, Human Rights Watch interviewed 20 female escapees who recounted how ISIS fighters separated young women and girls from men and boys and older women. They were moved “in an organised and methodical fashion to various places in Iraq and Syria”.

They were then sold or given as gifts and repeatedly raped or subjected to sexual violence.Fatwa No. 64, dated January 29, 2015, and issued by ISIS’ committee of research and fatwas, appears to codify sexual relations between ISIS fighters and their female captives for the first time, going further than a pamphlet issued by the group in 2014 on how to treat slaves.

A leading expert at Princeton University, Cole Bunzel, said the fatwa went beyond what has previously been published by the militants on how to treat female slaves.