Gender Dynamics in the ‘Islamic State’

The atrocious nature of the sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) perpetuated by ISIS has long focused attention on the group’s extremely conservative interpretation of how men and women were supposed to live together in its self-proclaimed “Islamic State.”^[1] Women were mostly confined to the household, which they could only leave if covered in a niqab, a full-face and body cover, and gloves, and all while accompanied by a male member of their family. All men were forced to grow beards, pray five times a day and cover their bodies in traditional dress.

Transgressing these narrowly defined rules could result in imprisonment, torture, sexual violence, beheadings, stoning and immolation.^[2] Women, as wives or sexual slaves, were treated as “spoils of war.”^[3] Women were killed simply for working as doctors, lawyers, politicians, or journalists.^[4] Sexual and gendered minorities (SGM) were systematically persecuted and murdered.^[5]

And yet, women also joined ISIS’ project wilfully, both locally and in large numbers from abroad.^[6] In ISIS-held areas, gender norms—the societal principles that govern the behaviour of women and men, girls and boys—were highly contingent on other identity markers. Yazidi and some Christian women and girls were forced into sexual slavery, Yazidi boys and men were forcibly converted, and men belonging to ethnic and religious minorities (including Kurdish, Shabak and Shi’a men) were often slaughtered on the spot in infamous massacres.^[7]

ISIS’ interpretation of gender norms was so extreme because gender was central to a larger extremist project at the core of the group’s identity. By regulating how men and women could behave, ISIS set itself apart from other societies—specifically other Muslim societies, but also those in the western world—and thereby defined what was different and specific about ISIS. In other words, the so-called “caliphate” was not only defined by its geographical borders but also by how men and women were allowed to act within those borders. ISIS’ extremely conservative view of gender relations therefore has to be understood within the larger ideological project of Salafi-jihadi Islam as well as the particular neo-colonial geo-politics of the Middle East—specifically the US invasion of Iraq—at the time of the group’s emergence.

Salafism, a revivalist movement within Sunni Islam, demands the emulation of the lives, and religious and social customs of the first three generations of Muslims following the revelation of the Prophet Muhammad (Peace Be Upon Him) in the 7^th century Arab Peninsula.^[8] Social relations, including those between men and women, are therefore built on an idealised image of a desert-dwelling society that existed some 1,300 years ago. Salafism emerged at the end of the 19^th century, in part as a response to western colonial domination of the Middle East and North Africa.^[9] Its anti-colonial stance tried to distil an “authentic” and “true” Islam from the earliest of the prophet’s followers, an indigenous cultural essence that presented itself as an antidote to western values spread through colonial domination. Salafi interpretations of gender norms are therefore decisively and deliberately anti-modern in the sense that they defy modernity’s logic of the liberal rational subject pursuing individual freedoms through choice—values that characterise western views of gender equality.^[10]

In ISIS’ interpretation of Salafi Islam, not unlike in many tribal and conservative societies across the Middle East and North Africa, the individual is suspended in a larger network of relationships, governed by notions of honour and shame that bind individuals into collectives.^[11] Notions of honour and shame govern a sense of self, family and tribe, and proscribe permissive behaviours for men and women. Honourable behaviour amongst ISIS members was meanwhile closely linked to notions of piety and particularly the submission to an extremely narrow interpretation of Shari’a law.^[12] Honour is the basis of social status for the individual and the tribe. And while honourable behaviour is demanded from men, and thereby constructs hierarchies amongst men based on more or less honourable behaviour, women are seen as the embodiments of honour, maintained through chastity and other “honourable” female behaviours. Honour codes therefore mandate that male behaviour should protect the honour of the family, often by controlling women.

Regulating how men and women could behave within this moral code, how they could dress, whom they could marry and, most importantly, what constituted piety for men and women was therefore central to how ISIS ruled individuals, households, and communities. The enforcement of strict gender roles was a central part of ISIS rule and the group’s state-building project.^[13] Regulating gender—whether through the enforcement of dress codes, the confinement of women within the household or the regulation of marriage or sexual violence—were all intrinsic aspects of how ISIS ruled and controlled populations.

Methodology

The following chapter lays out how this gendered state-building project affected men and women of different sects and ethnicities across ISIS-held areas of northeast Syria. It relies on a literature review, KIIs and data from focus group sessions conducted by RDI. Primary data was subsequently translated into English.

KIIs are quoted at length in the text below. KIIs were conducted in person and via phone by a researcher working on the ground. The security situation in some areas made in-person interviews impossible, and significantly delayed the research. Where such barriers existed, telephone, WhatsApp or Zoom interviews were organised as alternatives. A total of 27 individuals were invited to interviews, and 16 KIIs were eventually conducted. Eight individuals were direct victims of ISIS violence, four were family members of victims, and four worked in women’s and human rights organisations. The majority of interview participants were female (12 participants) while four were male. Five research participants came from Deir Ezzor, four from Manbij, three from Raqqa, two from Qamishli and two from Kobane.

Focus group sessions were organised by RDI. A wide variety of topics was discussed in 11 sessions that brought together a total of 87 individuals.

All names of research participants have been changed to pseudonyms in this chapter and other identifiers have been obscured where necessary.

While this research is deliberately intersectional—i.e., it pays particular attention to how gender intersected with other identities, specifically sect and, to some degree, ethnicity—a truly intersectional study would have required a more careful sampling strategy. Such sampling could not be done due to time constraints. Therefore, some of the sections concerning minority groups, arguably the groups that suffered the most under ISIS rule, draw heavily on secondary literature. Because of this suffering and claims of genocide against minorities, specifically northeast Syria’s Yazidi and Christian communities, these atrocities are best documented in the literature and therefore lend themselves to a secondary review.

Finally, there were areas of inquiry in this study, notably issues of how boys and girls were affected in gendered terms and other topics, that did not yield significant primary data and were therefore not included in the study.

Sexual and Gender-Based Violence

The impact of ISIS rule on gender-based, physical and psychological violence in northeast Syria was clear. Women and girls were subjected to sexual assault, rape, torture, and horrific killings because of [ISIS’] narrow view on gender, which strictly defined the roles for women and men. Violence was used as a tool of terror and intimidation to show the strength of ISIS and its control over the territory.^[14]

In areas under ISIS control, severe forms of SGBV were widely practiced against the general population but also within ISIS’ organisational structures. Sexual violence particularly targeted women from Yazidi, Shi’a, and other religious minority communities as well as the Sunni wives of fighters from armed groups in conflict with ISIS—including pro-Assad fighters.^[15] Sexual violence perpetrated against these groups was meant to enforce ISIS’ dominance over other populations, humiliating them in the process.^[16] However, sexual violence was also commonplace within the organisation itself. An extensive study based on interviews with up to 260 ISIS defectors demonstrated the group’s propensity to employ SGBV as an internal mechanism of rule.^[17] Former ISIS members described rapes, notably of both men and women, forced marriages and widespread domestic violence.

This violence also occurred in a broader context of widespread and systematic SGBV perpetrated by different conflict actors fighting in the Syrian conflict. As always, women and girls were the primary targets of this violence. After thoroughly investigating the period between 2011-2017, the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic concluded that Syrian government forces and other armed groups employed rape and other forms of SGBV as weapons of war.^[18] During the initial stages of the Syrian conflict, women were incarcerated as part of mass arrests and enforced disappearances, especially if they were considered to be family members of male dissidents. In detention, regime intelligence officers systematically raped women and girls repeatedly and even employed multiple perpetrator rape. As ground offences intensified, government forces and affiliated militias practiced SGBV, such as the rape of women, at checkpoints and during house searches.^[19]

Little data on SGBV against men and boys exists due to the extreme stigmatisation associated with homosexuality in Syria. However, a UNHCR study on sexual violence amongst men and boys within Syria and refugee communities outside the country found that anywhere between 10 and 40% of men and boys had experienced sexual violence.^[20] Many men and boys experienced rectal trauma because of their experiences, leading to pain and incontinence. Like women, men and boys were shamed and ostracised by their communities; in the worst cases, victims were threatened with murder. Some young survivors left school and many men reported that they had trouble finding employment due to poor mental and physical health and marginalisation by their community.

The ways that ISIS practised SGBV were extremely contradictory and in constant flux. These contradictions reveal a core tension within the group’s ideology: at the same time as committing widespread sexual atrocities, ISIS also had to uphold its own notion of piety and moral superiority vis-à-vis Muslim and western societies. This often led to contradictions in how SGBV against women and girls manifested itself and how it was perpetrated against different individuals based on their gender and sect.

A woman who was imprisoned by ISIS because her husband was wanted by the group as a “traitor” had to experience these contradictions first-hand:

They came to our door and announced themselves as [ISIS]. I asked them to wait until I could put my veil on. I tried to wake my husband, but he had fled from a window in our house overlooking an olive grove. ISIS members started taking my kids one-by-one to the next room. They asked me to wear my [niqab].

Once I had changed, I entered the room where they held my children. [They] had covered them with blankets and told me that they were better at taking care of our children than me and my husband. After intimidating us, they forced me to go with them and took my two youngest sons away while leaving the rest of my children alone at home. I was forced into a car where a friend of my husband’s was waiting—he had clearly confessed against us, most likely under torture, which is what I found out had happened later.

We arrived at the industrial area, and we went down into a cellar. I realised it was the main water tank for the city of Manbij. There, an ISIS leader named Abu Hassan was waiting for us. He grabbed a gun and loaded it, and said: “Welcome, welcome.” He was speaking Arabic, in a heavy Aleppo dialect.

The ISIS member from the patrol that arrested me said to him: “This woman, we went to arrest her husband. She helped him escape so we brought her.”

[My husband’s friend] had stayed in the car, but my children were with me. They were carried by ISIS members. I was crying.

They took me to a cell with about 15 women prisoners: the youngest was about 20 years’ old while the oldest was about 70.

There were many [different] charges against them. Some had been charged with fortune-telling and astrology. Some had been charged for smoking and yet others were charged with witchcraft and sorcery. One of them was a wife of an ISIS member, who was travelling, and she told him that one of the men came to their house and tried several times to sleep with her, so her ISIS husband imprisoned her. Among the prisoners was also a 35-year-old woman who was accused of witchcraft. She was later killed by ISIS in the village of Dadar in front of a crowd after Friday prayers.

After a while, my children got sick, so I sent them to my in-laws. When I told Abu Hassan about that, he told me that it was better for them, so no one would be with me when he beheaded me. 

One day, Abu Hassan came to the women’s cell and told me: “I have some good news for you…we captured your husband.” This was a great shock to me. I knew that my husband would be killed.

When I got out of prison, ISIS allowed me to see my husband one last time for five minutes. His head was on the ground and his hands were in handcuffs. His body showed signs of torture.

Abu Hassan asked me in front of my husband: “Did anyone hit you? Did anyone assault you? Did anyone hurt you?”

And I told him: “No.”^[21]

The woman’s story demonstrates the physical and psychological violence women and men experienced, the gendered nature of this violence, and the contradictions that riddled ISIS’ administration of SGBV in areas under its control. To begin with, armed ISIS members presented themselves as a moral authority, more capable at raising children than the woman and her husband. This claim itself is born from the conviction that ISIS’ way of life, its adherence to extremely strict and narrow interpretation of Shari’a, made ISIS members the stewards of the only “true” and “pure” Islam and therefore more fit to raise children.

The interaction also shows how women were made to suffer for their husbands and how the woman’s role as a wife made her culpable and therefore subject to legitimate forms of physical and psychological violence in the eyes of ISIS members (such as imprisonment, the removal of her children, and the threat of violence and murder). The story also demonstrates the particularities of in-group and out-group dynamics that played out in gendered ways when it came to violence. The woman, a Sunni Muslim, at least deserved a veneer of righteous moral treatment, according to ISIS’ own ideology. This way, Abu Hassan could uphold his—and ISIS’—supposed moral superiority and piety by demonstratively asking her in front of her husband if she was hurt.

The women imprisoned in the same cell who allegedly engaged in astrology and sorcery and were tortured and allegedly murdered for that transgression, did not even deserve this veneer of righteous treatment. Magic, sorcery, astrology and other superstitious practices associated with it are widely practiced in the Middle East and North Africa, even though they are not seen to be permissible in Islam. By allegedly practicing witchcraft, these women became “apostates” according to ISIS’ prohibitive definition of who constitutes a Muslim. Therefore, they had to be killed. Witchcraft accusations increasingly became grounds for beheadings and acts of SGBV against women.^[22] 

Because ISIS’ gender ideology was a form of identity-building, the group’s practice of SGBV was broadly, though not consistently, structured by different sanctioned forms of violence against in-group and out-group members. Gender-based violence was therefore also structured by the same notion of takfir, explained in the introduction of this report, that allowed ISIS to exclude certain Muslims from society as polytheists, apostates or heretics engaging in an act or belief that is seen as disbelief (kafr) in Islam or that brands a group of people as infidels (kuffar) from the outset. This is not to say that rapes and torture of Muslim men and women prisoners did not occur—they did and were even widespread—but it highlights the contradictions inherent to a violent organisation that tries to justify its hegemony, at least in part through moral and religious superiority.

This patterned SGBV based on in-group and out-group definitions practiced by ISIS was clearest when it came to minorities. SGBV under ISIS was therefore extremely intersectional and mediated specifically by the sectarian identity of the victims on the receiving end of that violence.

Intersectional SGBV

All sections of society in areas controlled by ISIS were greatly affected by violence, including individuals of different ages, races, and religious and cultural affiliations. However, religious and ethnic minorities were subjected to even more persecution and discrimination, as minorities were either forced to follow the strict laws of ISIS or leave the area and move to other regions. The religious and cultural properties and institutions belonging to minorities were destroyed.^[23]

The European Council’s Genocide Network concluded that ‘ISIS perpetrated violence against civilians in Syria and Iraq according to certain patterns based on the perceived affiliation of their victims to ethnic, religious or political groups.’^[24] And it was the Yazidi community that was singled out for the worst atrocities.

Genocide, sexual slavery targeting Yazidis

The Yazidi are a mostly Kurdish-speaking religious group of between 450,000 and 700,000 people that live dispersed between the Middle East, the Caucasus, Russia and western Europe.^[25] Most of the community today lives in northeastern and northwestern Iraq, which is also considered the Yazidis’ homeland. Persecuted throughout their history, the Yazidi are today considered one of the most threatened religious groups in the world because of their more recent persecution by ISIS, which has been classified as genocide by the UN.^[26] Although much of the Yazidi were captured in Iraq, most Yazidi women were transported to northeast Syria where they were sold into sexual slavery.

Wherever the Yazidi had been captured, women and men were separated except for pre-pubescent boys (who were allowed to stay with their mothers). Each group was then transferred by bus to temporary holding facilities. Initially, men and boys that were forcibly converted to Islam, after which they became ISIS captives and bound labourers, and transferred to ISIS-held cities (primarily Mosul, Tal Afar and Baaj). Men and boys had to work on construction sites or dug trenches, cleared rubble, and tended cattle. Men were forced to grow their beards and attend prayer five times a day.^[27] Anyone attempting to escape was executed upon capture. However, by spring 2015, ISIS backtracked on its previous policies and determined that forced conversions of the Yazidi were false and could no longer be accepted.^[28]

When ISIS overran the Yazidi homeland in Iraq’s Sinjar province, women and girls were moved to separate holding camps in Mosul and Tal Afar. Although rape of Yazidi women had been widely reported on a smaller scale, no mass rapes occurred at this time, even though hundreds of women and girls were held in each site surrounded by armed men. In this respect, the UN special rapporteur on Syria noted how:

This serves to emphasise the rigid system and ideology governing ISIS’ handling of Yazidi women and girls as chattel, as well as the control it exerted over the majority of its fighters. The sexual violence, including the sexual slavery, being committed against Yazidi women and girls is tightly controlled by ISIS, occurs in a manner prescribed and authorised, and is respectful only of the property rights of those who “own” the women and girls.^[29]

After their capture, women and girls were sold according to prescribed ownership and market regulations. With Yazidi women and girls treated as “spoils of war” (sabaya), only ISIS fighters were able to buy, sell and own women and girls, probably to prevent a “resale” back to their families—a transgression that was punishable by death. From the initial holding camps, women and girls were not immediately sold as slaves, but were moved on to several prison locations, like the notorious holding camp near Raqqa in northeast Syria.

A human rights activist who worked with Yazidi victims described the “trade” in the following terms:

The sale and trade of captive Yazidi women and girls [took place] in Mosul, but the main market—i.e., the market for slaves or captives—was in Raqqa, where Yazidi girls and women were bought and sold for a specific amount of money, or they were given as gifts and treated as slave girls or maids. Yazidi women or “captives” were used only for trade and sex; they did not have any rights.

There were children who were kidnapped by ISIS in 2014, these children were servants of ISIS families. A Yazidi child was not allowed to play football with the children of ISIS, for example, or with the toys of ISIS children, because he [or she] was a servant.

Most of the sales were done through the Saudis in ISIS, who were called the Jazrawis, the Tunisians and the Libyans. These three nationalities were in control of the trade in Yazidis.

Yazidi women became “wives” of ISIS members but could be resold over and over again. Unlike with Muslims, there was no marriage contract for her, no dowry, nothing, because she was a captive. Only by mere words such as “I gave you this captive” or “I sold it to you for a sum of money” would she become his and [then] used either for sexual purposes only or to serve the women of ISIS.^[30]

From these holding camps, women and girls were “auctioned off.” The process was systematic: photos were taken, and the women were either sold in markets or electronically via a messenger app with their photos and “slave numbers” serving as identification. Once a Yazidi woman was bought, ISIS fighters had full property rights over the women, giving them the right to sell them on or even to give them away as a gift. However, it was stipulated that women and girls could not be sold amongst brothers and that before a “resale”, they had to complete their menstrual cycles, probably to prevent the transfer of pregnant women.

While being held captive, women, and girls over the age of nine were subjected to ‘brutal sexual violence.’^[31] Rape was a daily occurrence for the majority. Rapes led to physical injuries, with women reporting bleeding, cuts and bruises. Sometimes, women and girls were handcuffed or tied to a bed. Gang rape was a common threat to enforce obedience amongst the women. A woman held by a Saudi ISIS fighter in a village near Aleppo reported that:

[H]e raped me every day that I was with him. He told me that if I did not let him do this thing to me that he would bring four or five men and they would all take turns raping me. I had no choice. I wanted to die.^[32]

Gang rapes were also, in fact, ordered and supervised by fighters against women and girls that tried to escape. Many of the women reported that they were forced to take birth-control pills.

Younger children were bought and sold with their mothers. Girls who reached the age of nine were taken from their mothers and then themselves sold as slaves. Younger children were often used as leverage or punishment against their mothers. One ISIS fighter killed several small children after an escape attempt by a woman. When the mother cried over the death of her children, he raped her and told her to stop crying over the death of her “kuffar children.”^[33] Children kept with their mothers were mostly aware of the protracted intense violence to which their mothers were subjected; many women described their children repeatedly crying behind the door as their mothers were raped.

Boys over the age of seven, when taken from their mothers, were moved to indoctrination camps run by ISIS instructors. There, boys from the Yazidi community and other minorities were mixed in with Sunni Muslim boys undergoing the same indoctrination training. The programmes consisted of Quranic recitations as well as military training with AK-47s, hand grenades and rocket-propelled grenades. The boys were further forced to watch ISIS propaganda material that included footage of suicide bombings, beheadings, and armed clashes. Training sessions also prepared the boys for the jihad against so-called “unbelievers.” When boys performed poorly, they were beaten by their instructors. For the Yazidi boys in the camps, their past was considered to have been completely erased and there was no mention of their original religion or culture. The UN special rapporteur on Syria noted that the objective of these camps was two-fold:

On a general level, it aims at increasing recruitment, and all children are treated as potential or future recruits regardless of their background. But on a specific level, targeting the Yazidi boys uniquely, it aims at destroying their religious identity as Yazidis and recasting them as followers of Islam as interpreted by ISIS. In this way, Yazidi boys are transferred out of their own community, and through indoctrination and violence, into ISIS.^[34]

Enslavement of Christians

In October 2014, shortly after ISIS’ capture of Mosul, ISIS’ propaganda magazine Dabiq acknowledged that it was giving away specifically Yazidi women and girls ‘as spoils of war’ to its fighters.^[35] ISIS justified its use of sexual violence and sexual slavery by saying that it was permissible to have sex with non-Muslim slave girls, as well as beating and selling them.^[36] While the Dabiq article did not directly refer to Christians, it included an ambiguous sentence pointing to the inconsistencies that ISIS demonstrated towards Christians:

This large-scale enslavement of mushrik [polytheist] families is probably the first since the abandonment of this Shari’a law. The only other known case—albeit much smaller—is that of the enslavement of Christian women and children in the Philippines and Nigeria by the mujahidin there.^[37]

Ordinarily, the term mushrikin (polytheists) was reserved for the Yazidi in ISIS’ vocabulary, while Christians would be referred to as one of the “people of the book.” However, the paragraph above includes the enslavement of Christians in the Philippines and Nigeria within the mushrikin category. The article states directly that the enslavement of Alawi, Druze, Ismaili and Shi’a “apostates” is contested in Islamic jurisprudence. However, this de jure ambiguity about the enslavement of Christians was quickly reversed by a document that de facto stated that Christian women were being sold as slaves.

A so-called “price list” emerged in November 2014, indicating that Christian women were equally subjected to sexual slavery. The list was authenticated in 2015 by Zainab Bangura, the UN’s special representative of the secretary-general for sexual violence in conflict.^[38] The list included prices for Yazidi and Christian women and girls from as young as one year old for $172, and as old as 50 years’ old for $75. In a response to the list, the UN special rapporteur wrote: “Atrocious accounts on the abduction and detention of Yazidi, Christian, as well as Turkmen and Shabak women, girls and boys, and reports of savage rapes, are reaching us in an alarming manner,” adding that some 1,500 Yazidi and Christian women and girls may have been forced into sexual slavery.^[39]

In the largest attack on Christians in Syria, on 23 February 2015, ISIS captured 35 villages primarily inhabited by Assyrian Christians along the Khabour River in northeast Syria. Although 1,200 families were able to flee to nearby Qamishli and Hasakeh,^[40] ISIS kidnapped about 226 Christian families and 60 individuals, who were then presented to the ISIS-run Shari’a Court in nearby al-Shaddadah. The court ruled in accordance with the dhimmi pact, requesting the families to pay the jizya tax. In reality, however, families remained hostages of ISIS. It took three years, videotaped beheadings of three hostages,^[41] and relentless fundraising by Assyrian priest Mar Afram Athneil to secure the release of the hostages. The average ransom per hostage was $50,000.

Social and Psychological Effects of SGBV

After the defeat of ISIS, there is still physical and psychological violence. Women and girls are still subjected to discrimination and violence. Therefore, there is a need to educate society about the importance of combatting gender-based violence, encourage the active participation of women in all areas of life, and provide psychological and social support to women and girls who have been subjected to violence. The rule of ISIS greatly affected the mental health of women and girls, and they were subjected to severe psychological trauma and their psychological state was greatly affected.^[42]

SGBV as a weapon of war not only leaves survivors with physical injuries, it also has long-lasting psychological and social effects. In Syria, where a woman’s chastity is often linked to family honour, the systematic rape of women breaks up family and community ties that are essential to community resilience. Survivors of rape and potential children born through rape are often ostracised and even expelled from the community. In the worst cases, women are killed by their relatives through so-called “honour killings.”^[43] Systematic rape therefore breaks down the very social links that are essential to survival in times of war.

Many of the former wives and children of ISIS members reside in the al-Hol camp in northeast Syria. The camp has a Syrian component, an Iraqi component and an “international annex” where women and children from dozens of countries live. The number of women and children in the annex is now around 8,500, down from a high of 12,000 in 2019. In the Syrian component, there have been significant numbers released back into their communities under a tribal sponsorship programme in which a tribal sheikh guarantees their safety and integration back into society. Tensions exist between the reintegrated families of former fighters and host communities, especially in rural Deir Ezzor.

Marriages, forced marriages and the wives and children of ISIS

As soon as ISIS members came to the area, they started looking for good girls to marry. The ISIS members were not from Sirrin. They were looking for women, and they used to enter the houses and ask: “Do you have a woman for marriage?” Their dialects were strange and different. Some of them were Chechen.

We, the women and girls, hid. The owner of the house and the male members of the family were talking to them. They were afraid for us, thinking that if one of the men saw us, they would take us away.^[44]

The testimony above indicates that ISIS fighters incessantly sought “wives.” From its inception, ISIS used access to heterosexual sex, child marriages, sexual slavery and the general subjugation of women as recruitment tools.^[45] Many recruits were young men from conservative communities where sexuality was highly regulated by marriages that required large dowries. However, high unemployment rates, political turmoil and a confluence of other factors had created a “marriage crisis” in the Middle East and North Africa, whereby young men and women had to significantly delay marriages, and therefore sexuality, for socio-economic reasons.^[46] ISIS’ tactic of promoting access to women and sexuality within the permissible bounds of pious Islamic marriage was therefore an extremely successful recruiting tool among young men. Women became “spoils of war” to male fighters and forced marriages were commonplace:^[47]

I tried to accept reality and cope with it. But all my attempts failed, and I could not adapt to the new situation, and he treated me very badly. He used to treat me with sexual violence and all he wanted was sex. He didn’t care about my feelings or anything but satisfying his lust.

In the days after I left the hospital, he treated me cruelly as if I were an animal in a house. He used to come to the house whenever he wanted to satisfy his lust and then he left me. And if he got angry with me for any reason, he would leave me without food or drink for a whole week, then he would feed me only when he wanted to have sex. The way he used to deal with me was as if I was his captive and not a wife, not as a human being or a Muslim. I always wondered if this is Islamic, but it is impossible for Islam to be like this!

Meanwhile, he married a second wife who was an immigrant from the Netherlands. Her name is Samantha. This is all I know about her, and here the problems between me and him began to increase. I began to demand him to be fair and to talk to me since I was living in a prison between four walls.[48]

And while this use of marriage as an incentive for young men to join ISIS was vitally important throughout the years of ISIS rule, the group also increasingly used marriage to attract women to its so-called “caliphate” as well. To begin with, when ISIS was still a Salafi-jihadi insurgent group, ISIS recruits and members were only men. But building a proto-state required women just as much as men. Increasingly, ISIS has promised permissible and pious sexuality to men and women under the helm of Islamic marriage. ISIS stipulated who could sign a marriage contract (nikah), something that could only be issued in the presence of an ISIS official.

Soon, dowries were regulated as well. Minimum dowries were set at $5,000, making marriages a serious long-term investment—ISIS declared that this was intended to protect foreign women who wanted to marry ISIS fighters, since local women had higher expectations regarding dowries.^[49] Foreign women, in fact, were not allowed to live in ISIS-held areas without being married. They had to stay in ISIS guesthouses until a suitable marriage could be arranged.^[50] Locally, through marriage, old kinship ties could be weakened and even severed, and new ones—those that suited ISIS best—could be established in their place. In this way, marriage played an essential role in creating a new society, a new state, the “caliphate” itself, an entity that set itself apart from the society that existed before, through the creation of new social bonds:

I got married to an ISIS member. He treated me badly, very badly. As for my family, they were good to me. But my ISIS husband deprived me of my family and my relatives. He did not allow me to communicate with them—only every six or seven months.

He changed the way I thought. He said I couldn’t leave the house because everyone outside of it was an infidel. After a while, I began to believe him. I saw people as he described them. I was always locked in the house, as if I were in a cage, never going out. When he came, he would tell me what was happening outside. I did not know what was going on outside. For a while, my view about the society outside became his. I thought that everyone outside was an apostate. He was planting hatred in my heart: against society in general but particularly against the people of my country.^[51]

Regulating marriages is a key concern for all states. But in its attempt to build a proto-state, ISIS treated the regulation of social relations, and particularly that of marriage, as an explicit act of state-building. According to one academic study written before the group’s downfall:

By imposing regulations on marriages, [ISIS] is attempting to add layers of legitimacy by instilling a veneer of religious and state approval to the new families and kin/gender relations created by the regime. The regulations prove to followers that Allah governs their new lives even as they transgress local customs.^[52]

Regulating marriage in this way, especially during the chaos of war, uses God’s permission for the project of religious nationalism, binding family and kinship relations to the nation-state. It is a way to link the private lives, connections and loyalties of individuals to the public life of the state via the legitimacy of religion endowed in the proto-state.

While many women were forced into marriages and sexual enslavement, many other women joined willingly. Joining ISIS willingly as a woman is another seeming paradox. Why did women, whether local or foreign, voluntarily submit to an oppressive, patriarchal and often misogynistic gender regime by marrying ISIS fighters and joining their so-called “caliphate?” At least four thousand women, and probably many more, travelled from across the globe to join ISIS.^[53] And many more joined locally as the so-called “brides of ISIS.” The vast majority of local and foreign women became wives and mothers, although some joined ISIS’ morality police, the hisba.^[54]

Like many men, women were drawn by ISIS’ claim that the “caliphate” was the only legitimate way to live in the world as a Muslim under Shari’a law. ISIS claimed repeatedly through its media that women were ‘trying to build an Islamic state that lives and abides by the law of Allah’ while ‘women’s responsibility as Muslims was to become pious wives and mothers; they were fulfilling God’s purpose.’^[55] Like men, women were drawn by their anger over Assad’s violence and the global Islamophobia that ostracised Muslims in the west and elsewhere.^[56] Online propaganda promised women better, easier, more appropriate lives in religious terms, free housing and a ‘life free of discrimination and the constraints and pressures of secular society.’[57] ISIS propaganda also presented the group as a liberating force for women who already lived in conservative households.

Although Salafism is a highly patriarchal ideology, it can be argued that it is not inherently oppositional to feminism as understood as gender equality. There are, some would say, strong Islamist feminist strands within Salafism that seek a kind of women’s liberation through piety rather than the individual, rational choices on which western feminism is often based.^[58] Joining ISIS could therefore be seen as a kind of liberation—even though the reality was often vastly different from the propaganda. It offered women a different kind of freedom and agency to take their lives into their own hands. It gave young women license to defy the authority of their non-ISIS fathers and husbands.^[59]

However, the reality for many ISIS wives was much the same as described above. Life was structured by (often sexual) violence, confinement, and many of the same abuses that local women experienced.

Masculinities

The rule of ISIS greatly affected concepts of masculinity and femininity, as they imposed their narrow vision of gender on people, and the appropriate roles for men and women were strictly defined. Men were supposed to have strong and violent roles, while women had weak roles under the control of men.^[60]

As is clear from the statement above, ISIS forced its extremely narrow gender norms on both men and women. While many men stood to gain from ISIS’ highly patriarchal and misogynistic interpretation of gender relations, by being granted unprecedented power over certain women—and more power over women as a whole—ISIS’ interpretation of an idealised masculinity also came at a great cost for many men.

Syria’s authoritarian political system and the loss of traditional male identities throughout the war paved the way for ISIS’ hypermasculine identity. It is understandable that a domineering authoritarian political system ruled by secret police and the constant threat of violence produced strong male hierarchies with an all-powerful hegemonic masculine authoritarian state at the top. Marginalisation, victimisation, and lack of agency vis-à-vis this state produce certain kinds of subordinate masculine identities for most men. Revolution against a dictator can therefore be interpreted as a revolt of one kind of masculinity against another.

The most extensive study of masculinity in the context of the Syrian conflict found that masculine values are central to the susceptibilities of joining an armed group. By joining an armed group, a ‘lost masculine identity’ could be reattained in situations in which traditional masculine roles were unattainable for socio-economic reasons, for example.^[61] Research amongst Syrian refugees has also shown that the loss of men’s traditional roles as family breadwinners during the war came to be seen as a form of emasculation, which led some men to take up arms in response.^[62] In this sense, there is a strong connection between economic vulnerabilities, male identities and propensities to join armed groups.^[63]

Not unlike other misogynistic anti-feminist movements that have emerged in response to greater equality between the sexes in the past decades, ISIS offered its followers the opportunity to be “true” men able to live a “true” masculinity.^[64] ISIS offered its adherents a place where men and women could live out what was often considered traditional, historical gender roles.^[65] The official masculine ideal as promoted through ISIS’ propaganda outlet Dabiq was that of a pious Muslim man (according to ISIS’ own standards) who was warrior-like and heterosexual; but he was also a husband, father and protector of his community and especially the women therein.^[66] This idealised masculinity condoned and even encouraged violence against women, girls, and boys—as well as men that did not fit this narrow interpretation.

This is ISIS’ particular version of what has been termed ‘militarised masculinity,’^[67] which demands certain types of violent behaviour from men and boys, and typically brands those that do not want to perform this violence as cowards (or worse). However, ISIS also incorporated the notion of piety as well:

Men were afraid for their lives. They were forced to grow beards. They were forced to wear long clothes such as the jalabiya. With those long beards, men didn’t know how to eat properly anymore. Even at the time of prayer, they were forcing men to pray, even when men did not perform ablutions. “Come on, it’s time for prayer, get up to pray,” they would say.^[68]

As Brown wrote: ‘Performance of heroic brawn is insufficient, however; fighters for [ISIS] must act with correct intentions and the correct belief.’^[69] Again, notions of honour and shame were essential to the construction of masculinities in ISIS-controlled territories. Honour organises individual men into hierarchies of honour based on masculinity. In other words, honour codes result in dominant and inferior types of manhood.^[70] Being able to wield violence more generally, and especially with intent and piety, functioned as a key marker of honour for ISIS and thereby defined a dominant interpretation of what it meant to be a man.

Again, as with ISIS’ broader identity and its gendered ideology more specifically, this interpretation of manhood was set up in opposition to ideas of western men and the west’s supposed moral decay that ISIS often decried, and which the group claimed resulted in ‘bestiality, transgenderism, sodomy, pornography, feminism, and other evils.’^[71] By representing violent men as the protectors of society, this version of militarised masculinity justified male, heterosexual dominance over that society, thereby encouraging the oppression of women, SGM and anyone else that did not conform to ISIS’ particular interpretation of masculinity.

Conclusion

ISIS reflected one of the most radical utopian projects of modern times. Its members tried vehemently, using full force and extreme violence, to create a different kind of society, one that had not existed (in ISIS’ view) for at least 1,300 years. Under ISIS, “different” meant difference primarily from western liberal, democratic and capitalist societies, but also difference from those Islamic societies that ISIS viewed as morally and religiously corrupt.

As is so often the case in ideological battles between East and West, women’s bodies became a civilizational battleground for this radical utopian project.^[72] By restricting, oppressing and exploiting women—or at least some women—by defining their role as inferior to men, ISIS claimed to build a kind of society that was forged on more “authentically Islamic” gender relations. As such, it set itself apart from western liberal societies, in which gender equality is based on individual freedoms. But at the same time, ISIS’ regressive utopian gender project represents just one of a growing number of anti-feminist movements in the world today that promise men (who feel they have lost their traditional roles) a return to a place of masculine certainty defined by the rule over women. ISIS’ gendered project was therefore both a rejection of the west in the context of western neo-colonial projects in Iraq and Afghanistan. At the same time, it was also an inherently global and contemporary project forged as a backlash to growing gender equality around the world over the past half century.

Throughout history, radical utopian projects acted as projects of boundary-making: they defined who and what lay on the inside and outside of the new ideological project. Movements form identities—and in the case of ISIS, even proto-states—through inclusion and exclusion. Under ISIS, those that lay on the outside of these constantly and irregularly redrawn boundaries—Christians, SGM, Shia Muslims, westerners, Yazidis and others—were often killed, tortured and oppressed. They were seen as a kind of pollution that had to be eradicated to create, in the eyes of ISIS, a pure Islamic society. When outsiders were included in the new society, this inclusion was gendered. It was women who were included, but not as people, rather as commodified bodies, slaves and servants, a form of property that could be sold, bought and traded.

Finally, ISIS also ruled by regulating “permissible” gender relations, like so many other states and religious movements before them. Ruling through gender is efficacious because it inscribes the power of the proto-state through morality on individual bodies, instilling moral codes in people, which lead to self-regulation even where the state is absent. Ruling by gender relations then links this individual form of rule and self-rule to the relations at the household level, by proscribing how husbands treat wives and fathers treat daughters (and sons). Gender therefore legitimises the state and inserts it into everyday interpersonal interactions between individuals.

In all societies, gender norms reflect relations of power.^[73] Therefore, by studying gender in a given society—and specifically through an intersectional lens that reveals how gender interacts with other identities to produce power relations—it is possible to come to a deeper understanding of how power operates more generally. Recognising that gender is integral to power at various levels, and that it was integral specifically to the creation and maintenance of the proto-state that came to be known as the “Islamic State,” logically necessitates that this power is also undone at the personal and interpersonal levels. Dismantling ISIS is at least in part a project of rewriting how individual women and men feel about themselves, how they treat their bodies and those of others, and how communities are rebuilt by deregulating what it means to be a woman, a man or a sexual and gendered minority in northeast Syria.

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[1] Gender-based violence (GBV) includes forms of violence perpetrated on the bases of gender identity. Primarily this pertains to violence against women and girls (VAW), perpetrated primarily by men. GBV when including sexual violence is often described as Sexual and Gender-Based Violence (SGBV), but GBV can also be physical, without sexual transgression, mental, structural and economic. GBV can occur in the private sphere of a household, where it is often described as domestic violence or intimate partner violence, or in the public sphere where it can manifest as child marriage, Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) or so called “honour crimes.” When used as a strategy of war, SGBV can comprise a war crime or crime against humanity.

[2] Lisa Davis, ‘Reimagining Justice for Gender-Based Crimes at the Margins: New Legal Strategies for Prosecuting ISIS Crimes Against Women and LGBTIQ Persons’ (2018) 24 William & Mary Journal of Race, Gender and Social Justice <https://scholarship.law.wm.edu/wmjowl/vol24/iss3/4/> accessed 20 July 2023.

[3] Anne Speckhard and Molly Ellenberg (2023), ‘ISIS and the Allure of Traditional Gender Roles’ 33(2) Women & Criminal Justice <https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08974454.2021.1962478> accessed 20 July 2023.

[4] Davis, ‘Reimagining Justice for Gender-Based Crimes at the Margins’.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Speckhard and Ellenberg, ‘ISIS and the Allure of Traditional Gender Roles’.

[7] European Parliament, ‘Parliament resolution of 4 February 2016 on the systematic mass murder of religious minorities by the so-called “ISIS/Daesh”’ (2016) <https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/TA-8-2016-0051_EN.pdf> accessed 20 July 2023.

[8] Bernard Haykel, ‘On the Nature of Salafi Thought and Action’ in Roel Meijr (ed.), Global Salafism (Hurst, 2009), pp.35-46.

[9] Saba Mahmood, ‘Chapter 2: Topography of the Piety movement’ in Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton University Press), p.61.

[10] Anne Phillips, ‘Gender and Modernity’ (2018) 46(6) Political Theory <https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0090591718757457> accessed 20 July 2023.                  

[11] Speckhard and Ellenberg.

[12] Katherine E. Brown, ‘Violence and gender politics in forming the proto-state “Islamic State”’ in Swati Parashar and others (eds.), Revisiting Gendered States: Feminist Imaginings of the State in International Relations (Oxford University Press, 2018) <https://academic.oup.com/book/25553?login=false> accessed 20 July 2023.   

[13] Ibid.

[14] KII: female, Deir Ezzor.

[15] Ariel I. Ahram, ‘Sexual violence and the making of ISIS’ (2018) 57(3) Survival <https://doi.org/10.1080/

00396338.2015.1047251> accessed 20 July 2023.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Speckhard and Ellenberg, ‘ISIS and the Allure of Traditional Gender Roles’.

[18] Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic, “I lost my dignity”: Sexual and gender-based violence in the Syrian Arab Republic A/HRC/37/CRP.3 (8 March 2018) <https://www.ohchr.org/Documents/HRBodies/HRCouncil/CoISyria/A-HRC-37-CRP-3.pdf> accessed 20 July 2023.  

[19] Ibid.

[20] UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), “We Keep It in Our Heart”: Sexual Violence Against Men and Boys in the Syria Crisis (Refworld, October 2017) <https://www.refworld.org/docid/5a128e814.html> accessed 20 July 2023.   

[21] KII: female, Manbij.

[22] Kareem Shaheen, ‘ISIS militias behead two Syrian women for witchcraft’ The Guardian (Beirut, 30 June 2015) <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/30/isis-militants-behead-syrian-women-witchcraft> accessed 20 July 2023.

[23] KII: female, Deir Ezzor.

[24] EU Genocide Network, ‘The prosecution at national level of sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) committed by the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL)’ (July 2017) p.5 <https://www.eurojust.europa.eu/sites/default/files/Partners/Genocide/2017-07_Prosecution-at-national-level-of-sexual-and-gender-based-violence_EN.pdf> accessed 20 July 2023.

[25] There are several estimates regarding the population size of the Yazidis worldwide. One source estimated the community to consist of approximately 400,000-450,000 people including: 200,000 people in Iraq, 80,000-100,000 in Syria, 45,000-50,000 in Armenia, 20,000-25,000 in Georgia, 10,000-15,000 in Russia, and another 45,000-50,000 in western Europe. Other sources put the global number of Yazidis at closer to 700,000 people.
See: Garnik S. Asatrian and Victoria Arakelova, “The Religion of the Peacock Angel”: The Yezidis and their Spirit World (Routledge 2017); Raya Jalabi, ‘Who are the Yazidis and why is Isis hunting them?’ The Guardian (London, 11 August 2014) <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/aug/07/who-yazidi-isis-iraq-religion-ethnicity-mountains> accessed on 20 July 2023.

[26] UN News, ‘UN human rights panel concludes ISIL is committing genocide against Yazidis’ (16 June 2016)<https://news.un.org/en/story/2016/06/532312-un-human-rights-panel-concludes-isil-committing-genocide-against-yazidis> accessed 20 July 2023.

[27] UNHRC, “They came to destroy”: ISIS Crimes Against the Yazidis A/HRC//32/CRP.2 (15 June 2016) <https://www.ohchr.org/Documents/HRBodies/HRCouncil/…/A_HRC_32_CRP.2_en.pdf> accessed 20 July 2023.

[28] Ibid.

[29] Commission of Inquiry, “I lost my dignity”.

[30] KII: male, Qamishli.

[31] Human Rights Watch (HRW), ‘Iraq: ISIS Escapees Describe Systematic Rape’ (14 April 2015) <https://www.hrw.org/news/2015/04/14/iraq-isis-escapees-describe-systematic-rape> accessed 20 July 2023.

[32] Ibid..

[33]  UNHRC, “They came to destroy”: ISIS Crimes Against the Yazidis A/HRC//32/CRP.2 (15 June 2016) <https://www.ohchr.org/Documents/HRBodies/HRCouncil/…/A_HRC_32_CRP.2_en.pdf> accessed 20 July 2023.

[34] UNHRC, “They came to destroy”.

[35] ISIS, ‘The Revival of Slavery Before the Hour in Dabiq’ (2014) 12 Dabiq, p.14.

[36] HRW, ‘ISIS Escapees Describe Systematic Rape’.

[37] Dabiq, p.14.

[38] Doug Bolton, ‘Isis “price list” for child slaves confirmed as genuine by UN official Zainab Bangura’ The Independent (London, 4 August 2015) <https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/isis-price-list-for-child-slaves-confirmed-as-genuine-by-un-official-zainab-bangura-10437348.html> accessed 20 July 2023.

[39] UN Office of the Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Sexual Violence in Conflict, ‘Iraq: UN Officials Call for Immediate End to Sexual Violence Against Iraqi Minorities’ (13 August 2014) <https://www.un.org/sexualviolenceinconflict/press-release/iraq-un-officials-call-for-immediate-end-to-sexual-violence-against-iraqi-minorities/> accessed 20 July 2023.

[40] UNHRC, ‘12^th Report of the Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic’ A/HRC/33/55 (11 August 2016 ) <https://undocs.org/en/A/HRC/33/55> accessed 20 July 2023.

[41] Ibid.

[42] KII: female, Deir Ezzor.

[43] Ariel I. Ahram, ‘Sexual violence and the making of ISIS’.

[44] KII: female, Sirrin.

[45] Nelly Lahoud, ‘Empowerment or Subjugation: A Gendered Analysis of ISIL’s Gender Messaging’ (UN Women, 2018) <https://iraq.unwomen.org/en/digital-library/publications/2018/06/empowerment-or-subjugation> accessed 20 July 2023.

[46] Navtej Dhillon, ‘The Middle Eastern Marriage Crisis’ (Brookings Institute, 11 July 2008) <https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-middle-eastern-marriage-crisis/> accessed 20 July 2023.

[47] Speckhard and Ellenberg.

[48] KII: female, Tabqa.

[49] Aysha Navest and others, ‘Chatting about Marriage with Female Migrants to Syria: Agency beyond the Victim versus Activist Paradigm’ 32(2) Anthropology Today <https://rai.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1467-8322.12241> accessed 20 July 2023.

[50] Speckhard and Ellenberg ‘ISIS and the Allure of Traditional Gender Roles’.

[51] KII: female, Tabqa.

[52] Brown.

[53] Speckhard and Ellenberg ‘ISIS and the Allure of Traditional Gender Roles’.

[54] Ibid.

[55] Brown.

[56] Amanda N. Spencer, ‘The Hidden Face of Terrorism: An Analysis of the Women in Islamic State’ (2016) 9(3) Journal of Strategic Security, <https://doi.org/10.5038/1944-0472.9.3.1549> accessed 20 July 2023.

[57] Brown.

[58] Mahmood, ‘Topography of the Piety movement’.

[59] Erin Marie Saltman and Melanie Smith, ‘“Till Martyrdom do us part”: Gender and the ISIS Phenomenon’ (Institute for Strategic Dialogue, May 2015) <https://www.isdglobal.org/isd-publications/till-martyrdom-do-us-part-gender-and-the-isis-phenomenon/> accessed 20 July 2023.

[60] KII: female, Deir Ezzor.

[61] Henri Myrttinen and Lana Khattab, ‘“Most of the men want to leave”: Armed groups, displacement and the gendered webs of vulnerability in Syria’ (International Alert, July 2017) p.21 < https://www.international-alert.org/publications/most-of-the-men-want-to-leave/f> accessed 20 July 2023.

[62] Magdalena Suerbaum, ‘Defining the Other to Masculinize Oneself: Syrian Men’s Negotiations of Masculinity during Displacement in Egypt’ (2018) 43(3) Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society <https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/695303> accessed 20 July 2023.

[63] Myrttinen and Khattab, p.24

[64] Lisa Davis, ‘Reimagining Justice’, p.523.

[65] Speckhard and Ellenberg, ‘ISIS and the Allure of Traditional Gender Roles’.

[66] Dyan Mazurana and others, ‘Gender Under A Black Flag: ISIL recruitment’ (World Peace Foundation, 19 August 2015) <https://sites.tufts.edu/reinventingpeace/2015/08/19/gender-under-a-black-flag-isil-recruitment/> accessed 20 July 2023.

[67] Cynthia Enloe, The Morning After: Sexual Politics at the End of the Cold War (University of California Press, 1993); Graham Dawson, Soldier Heroes: British Adventure, Empire and the Imagining of Masculinities (Routledge, 1994).

[68] KII: female, Sirrin.

[69] Brown.

[70] RW Connell, Masculinities (2nd edition, Polity Press, 2005).

[71] ISIS, ‘The Fitrah of Mankind and the Near-Extinction of the Western Woman’ (2017) 15 Dabiq.

[72] Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate (Yale University Press, 1992).

[73] RW Connell,