THEY were kidnapped and then subjected to months of brutal sexual assaults.
And is if being the sex slave of an Islamic State fighter isn’t horrific enough, countless women and girls were then subjected to further humiliation — barbaric and appalling virginity tests.
Those who escaped and survived to reveal the horrors that they endured at the hands of Islamic State militants were forced to undergo the tests conducted by Kurdistan officials, according to Human Rights Watch.
“The girls underwent the abusive and inaccurate procedure as part of a forensic, post-rape examination” HRW Researcher, Women’s Rights Division Rothna Begum said in a recent Dispatches report.
She said the tests were seen as evidence of rape by Iraqi courts, despite the World Health Organisation stating definitively that “virginity tests” have no scientific validity.
“They are based on a commonly held but inaccurate belief that all women and girls who are virgins have intact hymens that bleed on first intercourse,” she said.
“As such they are ineffective for determining whether a woman or girl has been raped.”
Ms Begum, who interviewed dozens of girls who were captured by ISIS fighters when they swept through northern Iraq in August 2014, said the girls were in dire need of health care, counselling and other services to help them begin to recover from their ordeal.
While their stories were taken seriously, some of the girls were subjected to the horrific tests, she added, further adding to their trauma.
The committee gathering evidence of ISIS crimes this week revealed it had stopped referring sex slave survivors for virginity tests.
Instead they were adopting a new medical examination report on sexual violence based on UN recommendations, consistent with human rights and best practice, HRW reveal.
HORROR STORIES
The revelation about the testing comes as more stories unfold of the brutal acts ISIS militants have inflicted on women and girls, many who were sold and purchased as sex slaves.
It is estimated between 3000 and 5000 women and girls are enslaved by ISIS, most of whom come from the Yazidi minority, who are persecuted as “devil worshippers”.
In a November 2015 testimony, Zainab Bangura, the UN’s special representative on sexual violence in conflict, revealed how ISIS were institutionalising sexual violence and how brutalising women and girls is central to their ideology.
She said fighters who captured new territory often killed men and young boys, taking the youngest and prettiest virgins to their stronghold in Raqqa.
Some girls are sold several times as fighters tire of them, or in some cases killed.
“We heard one case of a 20-year-old girl who was burned alive because she refused to perform an extreme sex act,” she told the committee.
Another survivor of ISIS brutality also shared the horror of her ordeal at the hands of militants.
Nadia Murad, 21, was captured by fighters in her home town of Sinjar in northern Iraq before being sold into sexual slavery last year.
Speaking about her ordeal at Egypt’s Cairo University last November, she said militants “used to force captives to pray and then rape us”.
“We were not worth the value of animals. They raped girls in groups. They did what a mind could not imagine.”
BRUTAL TESTING ‘NOT RARE’
As barbaric as it sounds for rape victims, virginity testing has also come under fire in Indonesia where female police recruits have been reportedly subjected to the practice.
In a 2014 report, HRW said many young women described the procedure as painful and traumatic.
The women told how they were forced to strip naked before being given a “two-finger test”, to see if their hymens were intact.
The practice is also extended to female recruits looking to join the country’s military service.
But while the testing has been widely condemned by women and human rights activists, it appears the army’s top boss doesn’t have a problem with it.
In an interview with The Jakarta Globe last year, General Moeldoko defended the procedure reportedly saying “so what’s the problem? It’s a good thing, so why criticise it?”.
This comes despite Gen Moeldoko admitting there was no direct link between a woman being a virgin and her abilities as a member of the armed forces.
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