From our Female Correspondent: Gina on Women under Islamic State

“I’m interested in the lives of women who have lived through the rule of the Islamic State terrorist organisation in Iraq and Syria. There has been a lot written about Western women who have joined, but little written about the lives of local women whose territory was forcibly occupied and how their lives were affected by that.”

When Gina started her PhD in September 2017, the Islamic State caliphate was still very much alive. Her research over the next two and a half years would take her behind the curtain of a terrorist organisation most of us know only from the headlines and bring her up close and personal with atrocities most of us can only imagine.

A brief history of the Islamic State caliphate

A little background for those as uniformed as I. In 1988, the militant organisation al-Qaeda was founded by Osama bin Laden. The group had many splinters, of which one was al-Qaeda in Iraq, the predecessor to what we now call IS (Islamic State). This group rebranded and gained momentum after the invasion of Iraq, when many of the organisation’s leaders were held in US-run prison Abu Ghraib. One such leader was Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who would go onto become Islamic State’s first caliph.

The re-establishment of the caliphate is al-Qaeda’s long-term goal. The land governed by the prophet, a utopian homeland for the global Muslim community. And IS set about bringing this to immediate fruition, occupying pockets of territory across Iraq and Syria, sending out a call across the world for people to come join their cause. In August 2014, they invaded Sinjar in Northern Iraq, home to the Yazidis (an ethno-religious minority) and began a process of what can only be called ethnic and religious cleansing. Yazidi men were slaughtered and buried in mass graves. Older Yazidi women were forced into domestic servitude and younger women into sexual slavery.

These are some of the women whose stories Gina has been gathering.

Erbil, the capital city of the Kurdistan region of Iraq

Why collect local women’s stories?

“When we look at this conflict, it's very easy for us to see this from a Western perspective, to look at it from a counterterrorism point of view, for our foreign policy, but really, this has had the greatest impact on local populations. What I wanted to uncover was how this disproportionately impacted women.”

And so, she interviewed 71 women who had lived under Islamic State rule, 22 of whom were Yazidi – the largest number of local women who have ever been encouraged to share their stories. “What's important to remember is that although their experiences are individual, there are many, many common themes and trends that come across, and they provide insight that has not been discovered around certain elements of IS rule.”

These themes fall under the separate chapters of her recently submitted PhD. She explores the militarisation of society, the imposition of law and order, the provision of goods and services and the intervention of IS into private life. What results is a complex patchwork of experiences, including giving birth and widowhood, women’s access to education and healthcare, their life under new rules and regulations. “Collecting these unique perspectives, putting them all together and finding trends has been fascinating and it really does help us to understand the local dynamics of these terrorist organisations.”

This greater understanding could, she hopes, change the way in which the crimes committed under IS rule are addressed. “There is often gender stereotyping that sees women as more inherently innocent and there has been a lot of language used for foreign women who travelled to IS territories. ‘Oh, they were taken by their husbands, they didn't do anything, they stayed at home, they were a housewife.’ But what does a ‘housewife’ mean in an Islamic State-affiliated household? It might be abuse of a Yazidi slave, in which case that is also perpetration of the genocide. And so, there is the ability to use this evidence to try and push forward for greater conviction and greater accountability for some of the forgotten or undocumented crimes by Islamic State.”

Eysan Camp, an IDP camp in Duhok for Yazidis

Translating emotion through the interview process

To gather these experiences, Gina spent a month in Iraq visiting interviewees in IDP (internally displaced person) camps and experiencing the Yazidi community. She had been to Iraq previously, for a UN conference in Erbil, but had never ventured beyond the city, so this time she took every opportunity to immerse herself in vibrant Yazidi culture. She attended a Yazidi wedding, in traditional dress, learned how to do Kurdish dancing, attended Yazidi New Year at their holy site of Lalish, had a private meeting with the Yazidi spiritual leader Baba Sheikh, spent time with her interpreter’s family in a Yazidi village. “It really gave me a greater perspective for the interviews I was doing.”

And these positive experiences of an open, welcoming, joy-filled community added balance to a series of interviews focussed on devastating experiences. “It's very harrowing, the information that they're sharing and some of these women had never spoken about what they went through, so they put a great amount of trust in you. And you had to respond in the right way. You had to empathise or sympathise as much as possible. You had to show emotion and understanding and support for what they've been through, but also you cannot break down. In a way I felt that I didn't have the right to. I hadn't been through that.”

In order to communicate the emotional reality of the interview experience, Gina would make notes of her interviewees’ behaviour at different points. Laughing, giggling, fiddling nervously with clothing. Crying. “I wanted to give a sense of not only the experiences that were being retold - which of course are in the past - but also how those experiences are still influencing that person in the present. When you're writing about something like this, it is still very much an ongoing experience. For the individual, it doesn’t just stop the moment they are liberated. And what does liberation mean, in that sense? It's only physical at best, but certainly not mental.”

Lalish, the most holy temple for the Yazidi people

What does the future hold for the region?

Some of the women Gina interviewed had escaped IS – some independently, some with the help from smugglers from the Yazidi community. Others had been sold back to their families for ridiculous sums of money – up to £15,000 in some instances. As a result, many families are now heavily in debt, living in IDP camps and unable to rebuild their lives because they have used all their savings to liberate family members.  

IS lost control of Mosul (in northern Iraq) in July 2017. Three months later they lost their de facto capital, Raqqa, in northern Syria. By March 2019, they had lost all of their territory, pushed out by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and their caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was killed in a drone strike later that year. But Gina believes this is by no means the end of the violence. “There are affiliated sleeper cells in Iraq which have been carrying out attacks in the name of Islamic State, so there’s certainly a will for resurgence.”

Whether this comes to fruition remains to be seen. For now, at least, the Yazidi population has trauma to process and a community to heal. One can only hope that sharing the lived experiences of women under Islamic State will help to bring at least some of the perpetrators to justice.

To keep up-to-date with Gina’s amazing work you can follow her on Twitter here along with a selection of her articles on the Yazidi genocide, IS’s recruitment of children, and the life of women under Islamic State.