Source: The Citizen
Local activists from Mosul have reported that the Islamic State publicly executed 19 women by burning them alive. The women were burned to death in iron cages for refusing to have sex with Islamic State fighters, the Kurdish agency ARA News reported. “The 19 girls were burned to death, while hundreds of people were watching. Nobody could do anything to save them from the brutal punishment,” an eyewitness told ARA News in Mosul. Local activist Abdullah al-Malla told the agency that “they [the women] were punished for refusing to have sex with ISIS militants.” The 19 women were all from the minority Yazidi group — who were taken captive in large numbers as the Islamic State captured territory across Iraq, most significantly the Yazidi region of Shingle in the northern part of the country in August 2014.
While many Yazidis have been rescued or have managed to escape, rights organisations estimate that as many as 3500 people from the minority group remain in captivity, being held by the Islamic State.
Human Rights Watch has called on the militant group to urgently release Yazidi women and girls abducted since 2014. “The longer they are held by ISIS, the more horrific life becomes for Yazidi women, bought and sold, brutally raped, their children torn from them,” Skye Wheeler, women’s rights emergencies researcher at Human Rights Watch, was quoted saying. The plight of Yazidis held captive by the Islamic State, especially the women — who are subjected to torture, rape and slavery — has been well documented. In fact, earlier this year, the Islamic State drew up a fatwa detailing how and when its fighters can rape female sex slaves, an act the group calls one of the “inevitable consequences of jihad.”