By Darren Smith, Weekend Contributor

According to an Iraqi based aid worker, who identified himself only as Yousif, approximately two girls a day commit suicide in the aftermath of being raped by ISIS Terrorists. The news and other corroboration of reports of inhumanity directed toward women in girls are unimaginable. Compounding the horror experienced from gang rapes in open streets, being sold into sexual slavery, or subjected to other outrages is both the stigma and shame forced onto women and girls–a furtherance of ISIS’ crimes against humanity. It also shows a macabre window into a policy of ethnic cleansing by ISIS at several levels.

“There are different methods they use inside there, whether they hang themselves, cut themselves, different ways they do it,” Yousif said. “They don’t have hope that their people will accept them, at the same time they don’t want their babies.

Social and personal pressure, according to Yousif, encourages pregnant victims to have either abortions or abandon their baby at orphanages.

Concerning a pre-teen girl who allegedly became pregnant after being sexually abused by ten men, Yousif said: “ISIS was the father, she had been raped by more than nine or 10 men. She is very tiny. If she delivers naturally or by caesarean, she will die.”

Reports are many in the media of groups such as Christians and other religions suffering forced conversion to ISIS’ perverse religious doctrines under threat of death or harm to family members. Additionally those perceived to be racially impure, in this case the Yazidi who descend from Aryan ancestry and often have traits including blue eyes, lighter skin, and in some cases blonde hair, suffer rapes with the goal of passing genetics to offspring who resemble the girls’ attackers and ISIS’ version of a model people. That is, if ISIS does not kill them outright. ISIS regards the Yazidi as a devil people and initially called for all to be exterminated.

Ziyad Shammo Khalaf, of the NGO Yazda that offers assistance and first aid to the persecuted Yazidis, told IBTimes UK: “The girls were dragged away from their mothers. If the mothers pleaded them not to give away their daughters, they were beaten and tortured.”

It is not ISIS alone that engages in such savagery. The terror group Boko Haram recently pledged its allegiance to ISIS in March, 2015 and is using rape as a weapon of war against women in Nigeria.

A notable example is found in the Chibok school girls kidnapping involving reportedly over two hundred, seventy five girls. Public displays of the girls sent by Boko Haram show forced religious conversion and forced marriages involving the sale of the girls for a US$12.50 bride price. Escapees reported walking for days and in some case weeks to elude recapture and stated the girls remaining collectively suffered daily rapes at the hands of their captors.

Another faction in Africa is the Christian Terrorist Organization the Lord’s Resistance Army.

Since beginning its military insurgency in the mid 1990’s a common tactic is to kidnap children and press them into military service. Estimates are that at least ten thousand child soldiers of both genders have fought in the LRA. Children suffer high amounts of casualty in combat which in turn LRA raids civilian areas to acquire more children; often killing parents, teachers, and others in the process. And a sad reality is their intent to create a second generation of child fighters through the raping of now teenage soldiers.

Returning to the ISIS ethnic cleansing campaign the use of genetics to force the elimination of a culture is not limited to the present. It does have a history.

The same type of perversion was a central aspect of the racial purity ideal of Nazi Germany’s leadership through its eugenics program to promote “racial hygiene”. While differing in such direct application such as rapes, the program however also encouraged the promotion of fertility with those perceived by the Nazis to be of sound purity, while at the same time criminalizing miscegenation and fostering eventually genocidal acts levied against others.

Now, it seems the world has not learned its lesson as it pledged when the rightful goal of never forgetting never allowing genocides and crimes against humanity faded along with the acute memory of the Second World War. We face this again with several terrorist, non-state actors.

But aside from the comforts we in the West provide ourselves in being remote to the sufferings of “other people” the Yazidis and too many others have not the luxury of such indifference. It is a world of isolation and exile for Yazidi women victims who fear rejection, humiliation, and guilt even if liberated from captivity. For a few the trauma leads to death at their own hands–a terrible conclusion to a rape of a people.

Of the children born from such events let us hope at least they will not be held accountable for the sins of their fathers or be outcasts among the society they may be born into.

By Darren Smith

Sources:

Daily Mail
eKurd.net
Photo Credits: Reuters, Polaris

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