There are two kinds of women in the Islamic State, as Abu Ibrahim al Raqawi told me in a chat session on Facebook. The first kind make up the majority, and these are women who used to have considerable freedom of movement and who are now no longer allowed to do anything. They are no longer allowed to go out on the streets alone. They can only do so if they are accompanied by a male relative, by their father or by one of their brothers. If a woman should dare to venture out on the streets alone, she will be arrested, in which case one of her male relatives will be summoned to appear at the Headquarters of the Morality Police where he will have to sign an affidavit that this was ‘once but never again.’ If it does happen again, so Abu Ibrahim tells me, “the woman in question will be sentenced to 40 lashes, or otherwise her father or brother will have to undergo the same punishment.”
Women may also be accompanied by their fathers or brothers and nevertheless be breaking ISIL law if they are not wearing the proper prescribed clothing, a Niqaab in all cases, leaving only an opening for the eyes but otherwise covering the entire head and face. If they are not dressed ‘decently’, woman will likewise be arrested and the same procedure will follow as that described above.
Abu Ibrahim sent me a number of pictures showing the Morality Police’s fleet of cars and it struck me how new the cars were and how professional they looked, with the name of the police featuring impeccably on the white cars. This is yet another confirmation that ISIL has outgrown the status of a ‘common’ terrorist organization. It has become well-organized.
It seemed only natural to ask if women were still allowed to drive cars in Raqqa, as they were under the Assad regime. I was not surprised to find out that indeed they no longer were. Women under ISIL rule are permanently condemned to (remain confined to) their houses, because they are no longer allowed to have jobs either. They can no longer hold jobs, neither in the public nor in the private sector.
One of the cars of the Morality Police
Yet there are other women as well in the Islamic State. There are in fact two categories of women, as was already indicated in the title of this report. Under no circumstances, not even in cases of offences like those described above, are male Islamic Street Jihadists allowed to arrest women, because this would necessarily involve having to touching them. To solve this problem, the so-called Khansa brigade has been created, consisting exclusively of female jihadists. Khansa is the name of a female poet living in the days of the prophet Mohammed who converted to Islam. Unlike other women, these Khansa women are not only allowed to go out on the streets alone, but also to drive cars – to patrol the neighborhoods of the city. They arrest women who violate ISIL regulations, and, as Abu Ibrahim puts it: “They are very cruel. They beat women who violate regulations, they torture and flog them.”
Forced by circumstances (or so at least is how they see it), the Islamic State makes a distinction between two types of women: those being suppressed and those doing the suppressing. The suppressed women’s fate is all the more poignant when they find that their principal suppressors and torturers are also women.
In answer to my question regarding the composition of the brigade, Abu Ibrahim told me that there are Syrian women among them, but also women from Chechnya. Besides that, quite a few of them are Tunisian and Moroccan, speaking both Arabic and French, and European women with a Moroccan background. Thus there might well be a Fatima from The Hague among them, now torturing women in Raqqa.
After our chat session, Abu Ibrahim sent me a text relating an incident that had happened on Saturday 6th September. Planes of the Assad regime were carrying out air raids on Raqqa. A woman waiting in line at the bakery with her little daughter decided to make a run for it, along with many other women and their children, all of whom were panicking by now. She managed to get onto a bus to her village, but on her way there, while the air raids continued, ISIL men forced the bus to stop and ordered the women and their still screaming children to get off. They were told it was a tobacco check (Smoking is another thing that is prohibited by ISIL). But the truth was that the women had to form a human shield to protect the ISIL men who were being targeted by the raids. Quite superfluously, Abu Ibrahim added: “Women have been robbed of all their rights.”
And all this is happening in a city that used to be replete with female grace and beauty. “Women,” Abu Ibrahim writes, “used to go to the markets on their own. They would travel on their own. At weddings, the sexes would mingle freely; universities too were all mixed. These things were quite normal, just as they are in any other town in the world, in any other open society. Besides that, so many of the women in Raqqa were beautiful, also because there were so many European, notably Russian and Rumanian, women among them (…). And the women from Raqqa would mingle with them in a perfectly natural way, and teach them Arabic.”
When those days, so normal and so natural, will come again, and the streets will once more be allowed to celebrate female beauty, is the big question, not only for Ibrahim, but even more so for the women of Raqqa, who have lost everything they had.
Translated by Hans Verhulst
