Jihad and the West - Black Flag over Babylon Chapter Six Chapter Seven

Neighbors—“Forgive Them”

“Let believers not take for friends and allies infidels rather than believers: and whoever does this shall have no relationship left with Allah—unless you but guard yourselves against them, taking precautions.” Koran 3:28

            The Caliphate’s conquest of Mesopotamian cities and towns has tested Christian–Muslim relations. Many Christians did not understand how tenuous their peaceful associations were with their Muslim nationals. Families had grown up together, and children studied and played together. They thought they were friends. But soon after the Caliphate took control, some Muslim neighbors very quickly partnered with State operatives to harass Christians and take their property. A Christian man explained that the most vicious of the Jihadis were not the “Bosnians, Arabs, and even Americans and British fighters”; they were their neighbors. Other Muslim neighbors joined the State and killed or chased away Christians from their homes.

            Often, Christians have nowhere to go. One explained, “Our neighbors and other people threatened us. But . . . where would we go? Christians have no support in Iraq.” A Christian woman from Mosul recalled the murder of her daughter, who died in her arms. According to the mother’s account, her girl’s dying words were, “Forgive them.”

 

Level Four—Life for Yazidis, a House of Pain

“These men are not human. They only think of death, killing.”   Recollections of a Yazidi captive

            Of all social and religious cohorts, Yazidis have the worst quality of life. The Caliphate declared this religious minority to be devil worshippers. Yazidis constantly fear for their lives and sometimes pray for death. Men and boys have been randomly killed, taken from their homes, and sometimes conscripted to fight for the Caliphate. Women and girls are often sold as slaves, particularly sex slaves. They live in brothels, houses of pain. They hold a status comparable to that held by Slavs in Nazi-occupied Europe. International human rights lawyer Amal Clooney, who defends Yazidi women, said, “We know that systematic rapes have taken place, and that they are still taking place. And yet no one is being held to account.” An escaped Yazidi girl said, “Every day I died 100 times over. Not just once. Every hour I died, every hour. . . . From the beating, from the misery, from the torture.”

            If Yazidi girls are sexual fodder for the Caliphate, the boys are seen as potential fighters or suicide operators. They drill their dogma into children’s minds. One Yazidi mother, whose husband was shot by the State and who later escaped the Caliphate, explained that her nine-year-old son did not want to leave. He wanted to stay in the Caliphate. “My son’s brain was changed,” said the mother.

 

By summer 2016, as Iraqi forces dislodged the Caliphate from towns and cities, they sometimes had to protect the Yazidi dead as well as the living. The Yazidi mass grave sites need to be guarded because they contain evidence for future war-crimes trials. But sometimes there is vengeance. According to one media account, a Caliphate commander was killed by his former Yazidi slave. He had offered her to his friends, and later she shot him. Some Yazidis can fight in military units, as profiled below.

Profile Twenty-One: Sisters of the Sun

 

“To Abu Bakr—I am the sister of the girls you captured, the daughter of the mothers you hold.” A Yazidi fighter in the Sun Brigade, 2015

            By 2015, some Yazidi women could mete out justice to their former tormentors. Fighting in a battalion operationally controlled by Kurdish forces, Yazidi women stand proud in the ranks of the “Sun Brigade.” It was organized by a Yazidi musician-turned-soldier and staffed with Yazidi women, many of whose friends and relatives were kidnapped by the Caliphate.

 

            Most of the Sun ladies were between eighteen and thirty, and many had never held a gun before joining the brigade. In their better, younger years, they were students, teachers, and cooks. Some were wives or sweethearts. Then came the Caliphate and the killing. By midsummer 2016, Yazidi women and girls were fighting.

            A Sun leader said of Yazidis, “Women were throwing their children from the mountains and then jumping themselves because it was a faster way to die. Our hands were all tied. We couldn’t do anything about it.” Now they can. Today, their hands hold weapons. “We are Yazidi. We are women. You will never be able to take away our honor. . . . We will liberate our homeland.” Another said, “We will wipe you out.”