What’s a Fair Price to Buy Your Sister or Mother for Sex?

On the day after another beheading, we may have missed the other horrors of the Islamic State (ISIS).  Recently, ISIS leadership released a regulatory price for militants selling captured Christian and Yazidi girls … as young as 1-9 years old … as sex slaves and charging nearly 3-4 times the amount that they would charge for a grown woman.

 

A document obtained by IraqiNews.com, issued by ISIS, claims to be an updated price guide detailing how ISIS fighters must price their ‘spoils of war’ … which include female slaves and cattle.  The document (dated Oct. 16) claims that ISIS’ sex slave and cattle trading markets have seen a recent decline in demand; and because of that, ISIS’ overall revenue has been affected.  The terrorists must now abide by the new pricing scheme, or else they could face execution for disobeying ISIS law.

 

“In the name of Allah, most gracious and merciful: We have received news that the demand in women and cattle markets has sharply decreased and that will affect Islamic State revenues as well as the funding of the Mujaheddin in the battlefield,” the document states.  “We have made some changes.  Below are the prices of Yazidi and Christian women.”  The document has listed Christian and Yazidi girls, aged from 1-9 years old, with the most expensive price tag.  According to the document, those girls are to be sold for 200,000 dinars, or roughly $172.  Yazidi and Christian girls that are 10-20 years old are to be sold for nearly $129; those aged 20-30 are to be sold for about $86; and 30-40 year olds would cost about $64.  The cheapest of ISIS sex slave prices are for women that are 40-50 years old, who can be bought for 50,000 dinars, or $43.  The document also specifies that individuals may not purchase more than “three items” unless they are fighters from Turkey, Syria or the Gulf countries.

 

ISIS’ price guide was released a few days after a video spread across the Internet that purports to show ISIS fighters negotiating a trade of captured Yazidi women at one of the ISIS slave markets.  In the videoed conversation, it becomes apparent that ISIS fighters charged more for girls with blue or green eyes.

 

ISIS’ biggest sex slave trade centers are based in their largest strongholds in Mosul, Iraq and Raqqa, Syria.  As the Daily Mirror reported, females from the ISIS al-Khanssaa Brigade, which includes many female radicals from the U.K., are in charge of running the brothel in Raqqa.  “It is the British women who have risen to the top of the Islamic State’s sharia police and now they are in charge of this operation,” an unidentified source told the Daily Mirror.  “They believe militants can use these women as they please as they are non-Muslims.”

 

While the prices that ISIS has now set for its female captives might not seem like a high price for human life, multiple teenage Yazidi captives, who escaped after they were sold by ISIS in Raqqa, explained earlier in October that they were sold for $1,000.  The Yazidi girls said they were brutally treated, underfed, forced into sex slavery, and in some cases, forced to change their name.

 

Although previous reports have indicated that ISIS relies heavily on trading young women and teenage girls, the IraqiNews.com report is the first indication that children younger than 10 are also subject to that same slave market.

 

In mid-October, the ISIS tried to justify, through religious reasoning, why it is right for its fighters to kidnap religious minority women and use them as sex slaves.  In an article in the fourth edition of the ISIS English-language digital magazine called Dabiq, the group claims that Islamic law permits its fighters to take religious minority women as concubines.  “Before Shaytan [Satan] reveals his doubts to the weak-minded and weak-hearted, one should remember that enslaving the families of the kuffar [infidels] and taking their women as concubines is a firmly established aspect of the Shari’ah that if one were to deny or mock, he would be denying or mocking the verses of the Qur'an and the narration of the Prophet … and thereby apostatizing from Islam,” the article states.

 

In light of all this: Where is the real ‘war on women’?  Can’t our political parties see the folly of accusing one another of a quasi-‘war on women’ when there is a real ‘war on women’ being executed by a real enemy of women – the Islamic State?  Get real, America!  Wake up, before our daughter, sisters, mothers, nieces, and female cousins become sex slaves to this wickedly demonic so-called religion of peace!

 

Rev. Dr. Kenneth L. Beale, Jr.

Chaplain (Colonel-Ret), U.S. Army

Pastor, Ft. Snelling Memorial Chapel