SEXUAL VIOLENCE AND THE MAKING OF ISIS Saddam [2003] sexual violence remained a critical
instrument of state repression)
US Pres Obama most prominent reason he offered for When faced with threats to regime survival, the security taking military action against the Islamic State of Iraq and services quickly returned to old patterns of violence using al-Sham (ISIS) was the protection of women, children and rape and other kinds of sexual violence to intimidate ethno- religious minorities sectarian rivals Defending oppressed Muslim women is a major trope of the The broader breakdowns in state authority contributed to fight against terrorism conditions in which sexualized violence (honor killing) ISIS appears to match/surpass the Talibans misogyny became more commonplace US-led coalition against ISIS portrays itself as tough but Further solidifying sexual violence as a means of tender, empowering womens self-defense, seeking to exerting power over entire populations draw as stark a contrast as possible between itself and its antagonist The violence of the Islamic State sexual and non-sexual Western media celebrated British and Emirati female is part of its effort to construct alternative institutions of pilots and Kurdish female fighters who took up arms protection and public services against ISIS ISIS already functions like a state within its territory: Extorts taxes Instead of raw disgust, confronting ISIS requires a more Redistributes grain, petrol and crucial foodstuffs systematic examination of the roots and impact of its Regulates education and cultural life violent strategies including its specific targeting of women Controls oilfields and refineries (E.Syria & W. Iraq) gaining access to millions of dollars in revenue from smuggling In war and crisis states tend to adopt hyper-masculine Seized key hydroelectric infrastructure on Tigris and characteristics: use violence to defend territory, lives and Euphrates rivers and their tributaries, exerting control honor over both electricity generation and irrigation Men are primary implementers of violence as well as the main decision-makers in matters of state policy ISIS uses sexual violence to construct a distinctive form of pertaining to military and security affairs hyper-masculine Islamic state Women are cast in the opposite role: beautiful souls; Its hyper-masculinity is intertwined with Sunni innocents; embodying peace and purity fundamentalist, supremacist ideology and the In warfare women and children are automatically attendant notion of ethno-sectarian hierarchy deemed civilian non-combatants Sexual violence helps to subordinate and degrade Shiites, Mothers, daughters and wives are sacrosanct, Alawites, Yazidis, Christians and other groups ISIS deems worthy of greatest sacrifices for defense and enemies, infidels and apostates protection Captured women and girls are placed into sexual slavery Men as warriors empowered by the ability to protect their and become breeding stock women and masculine states stronger for cloistering their Sexual Violence reinforces bonds among Sunni Muslims female citizens turning motley crew of true believers, opportunists, thugs These gender norms create stronger incentives to target and outright sociopaths into networks that form the upper women for violence levels of the embryonic Islamic State Destroying the sanctity of females demonstrates an enemys disempowerment and emasculation Violent Fathers The interplay of hyper-masculinity and beautiful soul abets sexual violence against men: the Histories of Syria and Iraq neo-patriarchy which the ultimate act of humiliating de-masculinization boundaries between family, society and state are blurred Other cultures deem victimization of this kind so The state operates as a macrocosm of the family and neo- shameful even discussing it is taboo patriarchy deploys modern techniques of governance to reinforce traditional modes of male domination In conditions where rebels lack the important symbolic Men are heads of households and expect complete resources of international recognition, the perceived need submission to exhibit hyper-masculinity (ideational component) can Women are treated as subordinate sources of sexual be especially pronounced and reproductive resources and as family managers Neo-patriarchy suffuses broad aspects of governance in ISISs sexual violence emulates practices that have been the Arab world from the way bureaucracies are organized endemic for decades in Iraq and Syria to the way armies are disciplined ISIS emerged from a socio-political environment deeply Emerged as colonial mandates: Syria (French) & Iraq imbued with violence, particularly sexualized violence (British) which offered a distinctly paternalistic and against women infantilizing model of governance During Saddam Hussein and Assad Dynasty the Iraq and The mandates were distinctly masculine: states are Syrian states used sexual violence to sustain ethno- catered to some of the material needs of women sectarian hierarchies, linking hyper-masculine ideals to through welfare provision but reinforced their status as particular forms of ethnic and sectarian domination (under beautiful but politically inert souls the moderate Bashar al-Assad [2000] and removal of Iraqi and American security services failed to stop a the cults of personality (Iraqi Baath party, Saddams tidal wave of rapes and other sexual crimes familial web & Hafezs fellow ALwaites) surrounding both Without recourse to effective state institutions many Saddam and Hafez stressed their role as national fathers communities tool to self-policing through local militias interventions in sexual life were useful for battering those and gangs who refused to accommodate these new patriarchs Honor killing was employed to enforce communal (clergy and other counter-revolutionaries) boundaries and solidarity The newly empowered Shia Islamist parties Iraq encouraged this transformation The regulation of sexual relationships and the more Revisions to Iraqs constitution in 2005 effectively acute forms of sexual violence were intimately related nullified previous provisions granting women to maintaining Sunni political hegemony protection in personal status Saddams regime inherited the Ottoman system of Sectarian family and religious law was reintroduced classifying citizens as either of Arab (Ottoman) or Iranian and constitutional commitments to gender equity descent and used sexual regulation to eliminate the diluted latter Coercive, violent interventions into sexual life intensified For Sunnis during Iran-Iraq war Saddams removal amounted to an outright inversion 2 yrs into the war the government offered cash reward of Iraqs ethnic hierarchy to Iraq men to divorce wives of Iranian origin and De-Baathification and dismantling of the army were offered monetary incentives for men to marry war seen as direct efforts to purge Sunnis from positions of widows power Women were encouraged to stay at homes and rear These changes had gendered impacts as well large families to make up for the hundreds Untold number of destitute refugee Sunni women killed/wounded at the front were forced to become sex workers in the nightclubs Under threat the regime increasingly reverted to overt and brothels of Damascus, Amman and other cities neo-patriarchy Prominent trope in regime propaganda: Defending State-inflicted sexual violence has been less severe but Iraqi women from the onslaught of Iranian hardly unknown in the new Iraq aggression Sunnis, but becoming the specific target of such state State itself used sex as a weapon violence was emblematic of a profound reversal of Iraqi prisons notorious for brutality reached new fortune heights of violence Under US control, Abu Ghraib prison continued to be Iraqi secret police videotaped their own sexual a site for sexualized torture of suspected terrorists violations of prisoners to blackmail victims into It was no coincidence that ISIS executioners chose to becoming informants clad their American and British beheading victims in Counter-insurgency against Kurdish separatists saw orange jumpsuits to invoke this history brutal treatment of women The US-run prisons served as incubators for ISIS Mid-1980s government began the Anfal a Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi held at Camp Bucca near campaign to destroy Kurdish villages wholesale and Umm Qasr deport residents to concentration camps in the lowlands With US withdrawing and insurgent violence worsening, Iraqi troops use of chemical weapons to depopulate Iraqi and Kurdish security services carried over many of isolated areas the practices of sexual and ethnic violence witnessed in During deportation, Iraqi troops raped Kurdish women the previous decades The assaults defiled victims and symbolically Human Rights Watch: documented how Iraqi disempowered their male kinsmen security services threatened and actually carried out 1990s early 2000s Saddams gender policies became sexual assaults of women in front of husbands, even more retrograde brothers and children The regime turned to tribal and religious values to Nearly all of the 4300 women held at the interior and shore up its base of support defense ministry facilities were Sunnis gave this Polygamy revived violence an unmistakable ethno-sectarian inflection Honor killing briefly legalized when banned again penalties became less stringent Syria Women were abducted in the streets of Baghdad Its history of sexual violence is tied to maintaining ethno- and sold to sexual slavery sectarian hierarchies Overthrow of Saddam and collapse of Iraqi state had a 1950s 60s series of military coups unseated the old direct impact on women Sunni aristocracy With US dismantling Iraqi army and police the security 1970s - Hafez al-Assad seized power for himself, a evaporated culminating victory for the entire Alawite sect which had been marginalized and reviled Assad tried to transcend atavistic sectarian identity domination through sexual violence and broader and made the liberation of women a primary front in regulation of sexual and family lives the campaign against religious conservatism They know what it is like to be at wrong end of these The Sunni opposition took overt religious and sectarian interactions and are desperate to avoid such fate forms, a faction of the Muslim Brotherhood began a military campaign and was brutally responded by the Cohesion and Control government ISIS adamant rejection of all forms of ethnically based After pulverizing the restive cities of Hama and Homs national identity is what sets them apart from most previous in 1982, state-run media lauded the knights of the insurgent groups in Iraq and Syria Baath for defending themselves and their families They see the entire notion of nation-states and Arab and the masses of people and homeland from a nationalism espoused in Baath ideology as merely group that brutally killed whom they could of women means to artificially divide the Muslim community and children For a pan-Islamic state, orthodox Sunnis sit at the Sexual Violence proved a crucial means to reassert pinnacle, certain recognized non-Muslim communities regime supremacy (Christians) are forced to accede to becoming Syrian security services abducted and threatened subordinate dependents (dhimmi) and heterodox to rape female relatives of suspected opposition groups (Shiites, Yazidis and Alawites) are to be activists and prisoners testified to a number of completely eradicated sexualized torture and interrogation techniques (machine that inserted burning metal into the anus) ISIS faces obstacles in fashioning a state based along these 1990s 2000s regime stabilized lines (refer to above statements) Sexual Violence appeared to abate Combination of greed and grievances motivates ISIS Political prisoners were released and censorship fighters, these varying motivations mean that special relaxed efforts must be made to monitor and maintain discipline Bashar al-Assad succeeded and a new era of political within the ranks pluralism Recruitment of foreign fighters across the Sunni Islamic Economic liberalization: children of Alawite military world (Chechnya, Pakistan & the West) already and state officials married to the venerable Sunni introduces language and cultural barriers compounded merchant families by the challenge of dealing with indigenous forces Bashar himself married British-born daughter of a within Syria and Iraq prominent Syrian Sunni Family While ISIS has a hard core of ideological committed Damascus worked to get into line with international radicals, it has many more latecomers who joined less norms and standards concerning sexual violence out of ideological conviction than for reasons of Jan 2010, the government issued a decree for the first personal protection and aggrandizement time criminalizing human trafficking given the ideological differences between the pan- Islamic ISIS and the Arab nationalist Baathists The older practices of sexual violence came back with however the relationship was bound to be vengeance when the regime felt threatened contentious and there has been evidence of violence the suppression of protests in Daraa in March 2011 between the 2 factions the events which catalyzed the massive national many fighters in Syria came as defectors from ISIS uprising depicted systematic sexual abuses rivals (Western-backed Free Syrian Army/al-Qaeda prisoners were sodomized, beaten on the genitals affiliated Jabhat al-Nusra), others were kidnapped and forced to perform oral sex from their families as boys, indoctrinated and trained security officials threatened detainees and their to be child soldiers and even suicide bombers families with rape, taunted families whose sons had sexual violence thus both asserts ISIS supremacy over been arrested to forget their children and if they subaltern groups and builds cohesion within its ranks really want their children they should make more and the officers will show them how to do it diff types of sexual violence play different roles in solidifying government forces and state-sponsored shbiha this hegemony and the most visible aspect is female (apparition) militia have been implicated in a large enslavement number of rapes and sexual violations of both men human trafficking alongside oil smuggling and hostage and women during the war ransoms is a major ISIS revenue source as was the case during Iraqs earlier civil wars, refugees several women inside ISIS compounds who had been and internally displaced people are ever more bound and raped repeatedly were found after susceptible to various kinds of sexual exploitation Kurdish forces retook Mosul Dam ISIS champions a return to a primitive caliphate state, captured women and girls have been forced into promises the resumption of the kind of Sunni supremacy brothels and are sold on the street that prevailed until fairly recently in both Syria and Iraq the semi-public display of sexuality is more than about Drawn from the Sunni tribes of the Jazeera and Syrian revenue, passing abducted women from man to man deserts, the leaders and foot soldiers of the Islamic State demonstrates the abject humiliation of a conquered have witnessed how states enact ethno-sectarian community ISIS own propaganda justifies these acts as All-female Khansaa Brigade the members operated permissible conduct toward non-believers who refuse checkpoints around the city and enforced strict codes to accede to Islam and staffed brothels that served ISIS fighters Islamic law, they claim, deems these women ISIS desperately short of women so they have sought to concubines and the rightful spoils of jihad, the bodies recruit young women online to serve as nurses, medics of the conquered are expropriated as sexual and or in other combat roles breeding stock These female recruits will be paired with ISIS growing Many victims were so psychologically scarred that number of male fighters leaving them to bear and rear they resisted returning to their own families for fear of the next gen of lions bringing shame to them * * * * These forms of sexual violence force infidels to the Some policies that can help mitigate the extent of the bottom of the Islamic States sexual and sectarian damage wrought by sexual violence hierarchy 1. The intl community must make dear its commitment to hold ISIS indicate a profound concern for the legalities of accountable perpetrators of sexual violence among all sexual relationships with slaves and ensuing issues of parties in the conflict paternity 2. Better training of security-service personnel, explicit illegitimate sexual relationships can yield legitimate instructions on the laws of war can prevent sexual violence kinship bonds due to Islamic laws tendency to becoming a routine technique of interrogation recognize patrilineal descent, captive mothers may 3. Unilateral change could have positive effects, many Sunnis be apostates and infidels the children of Muslim see ISIS as a lesser evil compared to rapacious govt forces, fathers are generally deemed to be Muslim given real protection fewer civilians will be attracted to the themselves ISIS banner These children must be accorded position with the Islamic community making them demographic Indirect ways to reduce the impact of sexual violence fodder for the Islamic state Govts should disrupt human-trafficking networks operating under their noses and investigate govt Second aspect of ISIS sexual violence is violence officials complicit in trafficking committed against men and boys Destination countries must take further steps to clamp Surprising since ISIS has maintained a fiercely puritanical down on all forms of human trafficking esp those prohibition on homosexuality and has publicly executed involving sexual enslavement and prostitution suspected homosexuals by throwing them from Overall this could reduce the financial incentives for ISIS buildings to engage in sexual enslavement and diminish ISIS The effect of on male victims are largely analogous to financial wherewithal those on females: besides the sheer physical harm they induce shame, guilt and feelings of dishonor The roots of ISIS campaign of sexual violence come from Aspect of male-on-male violence as a form of the same neo-patriarchal origins as their regime initiation or induction to new recruits antagonists Marriages of new recruits involve gang rape or The modes of hyper-masculine statehood that have sodomy emerged in the Arab world provided a blueprint for group participation helps build fraternal bonds among instrumentalizing sexual violence as a tool for state- perpetrators building The repertoires of sexual violence are effective precisely the third form, arranged or enforced marriage, has very because they capitalize on entrenched gender norms different meaning and impact that victims of such, females&males alike, are frequently marriage solidifies horizontal bonds, ties of peerage and so stigmatized that they cannot return to their home alliance between equals communities unlike concubines, marriage is a uniquely intra-Muslim The acts of sexual violence tear apart the basic engagement structures of family life, while at the same time the symbolic and political valence of marriage differs reinforcing the overarching neo-patriarchy of ISIS dramatically from sexual slavery and concubinage control it entails reciprocal exchange and mutual consideration instead of expropriation and seizure marrying into the ISIS fold might offer an attractive opportunity to enhance personal status and ensure protection; opportunistic marriages effectively extend ISIS umbrella of protection while augmenting its demographic base