Reports have emerged in September that Christian women who are being held captive in Mosul’s Badush prison by ISIS (the Sunni militant group that now wishes to be known as Islamic State) have been given the option either to convert to the group’s brand of Islam or to suffer daily rape.
Currently Mosul’s Badush prison houses hundreds of Christian, Yazidi and Turkmen (Shia Muslim) women and girls who are suffering sexual violence at the hands of ISIS. While many of these women are being gang-raped for refusing to convert to ISIS’s version of Sunni Islam, others are being sold to ISIS fighters as sexual slaves. Some of the victims are reportedly as young as 14 years old.
Shari’a law allows Muslims to take human beings as part of their war booty in the context of jihad. Such female captives are called sabiyah (singular) or sabiyat (plural), which comes from the Arabic root meaning prisoner.
