Illustrative photo of a refugee in Iraq. (Photo: © Reuters)
Women and girls are subjected to brutal sexual torture and sold as sex slaves across Iraq and Syria, according to the U.N. Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict.
Zainab Hawa Bangura told of one girl who was ‘temporarily married’ and raped 20 times, each time “forced to undergo surgery to repair her virginity.”
The UN News Centre reported that “Sexual violence is being committed strategically, in a widespread and systematic manner, and with a high-degree of sophistication by most parties to the conflict in Syria and Iraq.”
Bangura conducted a tour of Syria and Iraq from 16 to 29 April to investigate claims of sexual violence in the ongoing war. She also visited Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan and interviewed survivors of sexual violence including women who had escaped Islamic State captivity.
Before she left she said of the trip: “The visit is undertaken against the backdrop of a catastrophic new trend of the use of sexual violence as a ‘tactic of terror’ by extremist groups, not only in Iraq and Syria, but also in Somalia, Nigeria and Mali.”
On her return Bangura presented her findings in a news conference on May 7. She told reporters:
“Girls are literally being stripped naked and examined in slave bazaars.” She explained how captives were “categorized and shipped naked off to Dohuk or Mosul or other locations to be distributed among ISIL leadership and fighters.”
She described how “ISIL have institutionalized sexual violence and the brutalization of women as a central aspect of their ideology and operations, using it as a tactic of terrorism to advance their key strategic objectives.”
Watch the full press conference:
This is not the first time the U.N. noted the extreme use of sexual violence as a tactic of terrorist groups.
On April 14, before Bangura conducted her fact-finding mission, the U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki Moon made public an official U.N.report on conflict-related sexual violence in 2014. The report said that “The year under review was marked by harrowing accounts of rape, sexual slavery and forced marriage being used by extremist groups, including as a tactic of terror.”
In an interview about that report Bangura said Boko Haram and ISIS are so hard to stop in part because they are using “modern technology and tools to actually implement their medieval mentality against women.”
Watch the interview:
[youtube 0HECsZ_g2nw nolink]
In a hearing on the sexual violence in conflict report she told the U.N. Security Council “For the first time, (the report) articulates how sexual violence is integrally linked with the strategic objectives, ideology and finding of extremist groups, noting therefore that women’s empowerment and sexual violence prevention should be central to international response.”
