Locked inside a room where the only furniture was a bed, the 16-year-old learned to fear the sunset, because nightfall started the countdown to her next rape.
During the year she was held by the Islamic State, she spent her days dreading the smell of the IS fighter's breath, the disgusting sounds he made and the pain he inflicted on her body . More than anything, she was tormented by the thought she might become pregnant with her rapist's child. It was the one thing she needn't have worried about. Soon after buying her, the fighter brought the teenage girl a round box containing four strips of pills, one of them colored red.
"Every day , I had to swallow one in front of him. He gave me one box per month. When I ran out, he replaced it. When I was sold from one man to another, the box of pills came with me," explained the girl, who learned only months later that she was being given birth control.
It is a particularly modern solution to a medieval injunction: According to an obscure ruling in Islamic law cited by the IS, a man must ensure that the woman he enslaves is free of child before having intercourse with her.
IS leaders have made sexual slavery as they believe it was practiced during the Prophet Muhammad's time integral to the group's operations, preying on the women and girls the group captured from the Yazidi religious minority almost two years ago. To keep the sex trade running, the fighters have aggressively pushed birth control on their victims so they can continue the abuse unabated while the women are passed among them.
More than three dozen Yazidi women who recently escaped the IS and who agreed to be interviewed for this article described the numerous methods the fighters used to avoid pregnancy , including oral and injectable contraception, and sometimes both. Some described how they knew they were about to be sold when they were driven to a hospital to give a urine sample to be tested for the hCG hormone, whose presence indicates pregnancy.
The rules have not been universally followed, with many women describing being assaulted by men who were either ignorant of the injunction or defiant of it. But over all, the methodical use of birth control during at least some of the women's captivity explains what doctors caring for recent escapees observed: Of the more than 700 Yazidi rape victims who have sought treatment so far at a UN-backed clinic in northern Iraq, just 5% became pregnant during their enslavement, according to Dr Nagham Nawzat, the gynecologist carrying out the examinations.
In its official publications, the IS has stated that it is legal for a man to rape the women he enslaves under just about any circumstance. Even sex with a child is permissible, according to a pamphlet published by the group. The injunction against raping a pregnant slave is functionally the only protection for the captured women. The IS cites centuries-old rulings stating that the owner of a female slave can have sex with her only after she has undergone 'istibra' - "the process of ensuring that the womb is empty," said Bernard Haykel, an expert on Islamic law. Most of the Sunni scholars who ruled on the issue argued that the requirement could be met by respecting a period of sexual abstinence whenever the captive changes hands, proposing a duration of at least one menstrual cycle, according to Brill's Encyclopedia of Islam.
(Source: NYT NEWS SERVICE, written by Rukmini Callimachi)
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