Badass Ex-Sex Slaves Determined To Destroy ISIS At Any Cost

What would make a group of young-to-middle-aged women volunteer to risk their lives and a return to sexual slavery for a chance to destroy ISIS? Let’s find out.

The Yazidi are an insular religious culture native to western Iraq and eastern Syria. Their religion dates back to the 12th Century, and while it combines elements of Christianity, Islam, Sufism, Zoroastrianism, and more, it is unique in several ways. The most prominent: they believe that God doesn’t interact with humans directly, but only does so through Melek Tauws and six other archangels whom Melek Tauws leads.

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Melek Tauws has a somewhat familiar story: he refused to bow to Adam when God first created him, and thus was sent to a place of fire to burn. But unlike Lucifer, Melek Tauws quenched the flames with his tears, and redeemed himself in the eyes of God.

That’s important because the similarities between Melek Tauws and Lucifer made ISIS come to the conclusion that the Yazidi are Satan-worshippers, giving them free license to treat the Yazidi as brutally as possible. More than 5,000 Yazidi women were captured and used as sex slaves by ISIS, tortured and raped repeatedly over the course of months and years.

Obviously, every individual Yazidi sex slave has their own story, but there are many elements that occur over and over again.

  • They refused to bathe, so they would be too disgusting to rape, but their captors denied them food until they cleaned themselves — or simply washed them by force.
  • They were often lashed with electrical cables or actual barbed scourges.
  • If they were determined to be pregnant, many of them were forced to have abortions.
  • If a Yazidi sex slave did give birth, the mothers were not allowed to feed their babies; if the babies annoyed their captors too much, they were occasionally beheaded in full view of their mothers.
  • They were often married against their will, frequently to men who were too abhorrent to find a ‘legitimate’ wife — or occasionally to men who were already married.
  • And of course they were told that if they didn’t convert to Islam, they would be tortured even more.

That level of brutality and violence inspires a lot of hatred. That’s why it’s really no surprise that the normally peaceful Yazidi (whose religion doesn’t even have a Hell or an equivalent of devils/demons) have begun a program to gather together and train escaped sex slaves as soldiers. Led by a famous Yazidi singer, Xate Shingali, the fast-growing militia has one simple message for ISIS: “You rape us, we kill you.”

Their current goal: to help take Mosul back from the Islamic State.

They call themselves the Force of the Sun Ladies, a reference to the religion’s tenet that the Sun is the symbol God left behind to remind humanity of His presence. They are currently training with Peshmerga, the Kurdish military, and intend to give their lives — even risking a return to slavery if they are captured — to destroy ISIS. Even the youngest among them, a mere 17 years old, is committed. Let’s honor their bravery and tell their story so everyone knows what happens when you treat women like sh*t.

“You rape us, we kill you.”

Sounds like justice to me.

 

(Featured image courtesy of Yezidi YBŞ Fighter via Flickr, shared using a Creative Commons 2.0 license.)