Meghan Bodette
August 3 marks six years since the start of the Yezidi Genocide, when ISIS attacked the religious minority’s homeland of Sinjar in northern Iraq. Over a period of weeks, thousands of Yezidi men were killed, and thousands of Yezidi women and girls were abducted and forced into sexual slavery. Today, over 2,000 are still missing.
While ISIS has not held territory since 2019, the international community has made little progress in bringing genocide perpetrators to justice. In many cases, international attitudes towards former ISIS members have actively threatened these efforts. This is particularly clear in the case of so-called “ISIS brides”— the women who traveled to Syria and played active roles in maintaining the group’s reign of terror.
Accounts from survivors and activists describe how these women actively and openly upheld the genocidal violence that ISIS inflicted on Yezidi women and girls. Nadia Murad, a Yezidi survivor who went on to win a Nobel Peace Prize for her work to end conflict-related sexual violence, said in her book that ISIS women were “often crueler than the men” and that they often beat, starved, and otherwise mistreated enslaved women and girls “out of jealousy or anger or because [they] are easy targets”
Pari Ibrahim, a Yezidi human rights activist and director of the Free Yezidi Foundation, said in an interview that “when ISIS men left to fight, the [ISIS] women were left in charge. They tortured and psychologically abused our women. Some girls have told me that the ISIS women were the ones that put on their makeup, put them in the shower, and locked them in a room until they were raped constantly by ISIS men.”
A United Nations report on the genocide found that “wives and children of ISIS fighters sometimes participate in…beatings” of enslaved Yezidis,” and that “the wives of ISIS fighters…regularly force Yazidi women and girls to work in their houses. Many of those interviewed recounted being forced to be the domestic servant of the fighter and his family. Sometimes, they were also made to look after his children.”
ISIS women themselves have openly admitted their support for the violence that Yezidi women and girls were subjected to. In an interview conducted by women’s activists from North and East Syria, an unnamed female ISIS member from the Philippines said that Yezidi women could not have been raped, because they were enslaved in accordance with religious principles— and so they were not people whose consent could be violated, but property.
Despite this, governments and media outlets regularly portray women affiliated with ISIS as less violent and less culpable for atrocities than their male counterparts. The “ISIS bride” label itself suggests that these women only joined the group because of their husbands or the prospect of marriage, and some who use it even attempt to cast these women as victims—ignoring their very real support for the group’s ideology and practice.
This reductive outlook has already had policy implications. Earlier this month, Turkish intelligence smuggled an ISIS-affiliated woman from Moldova out of SDF custody, treating her as though she were a civilian. Discussions of the return of Shamima Begum to the United Kingdom have not centered on the crimes she supported and could be tried for, but on domestic politics and culture-war concerns.
The vast majority of ISIS-affiliated women from outside of Iraq and Syria have not been repatriated by their home countries. Aside from a handful of promising cases in Germany, those that have been have either walked free or been charged under terror laws—which do not address genocide, crimes against humanity, or war crimes.
Although stereotypes about gender, conflict, and violence suggest otherwise, history shows that women are capable of supporting and enabling gender-based violence on a systemic scale. The war crimes tribunals set up to prosecute perpetrators of atrocities in Bosnia and Rwanda famously led to landmark cases that recognized sexual violence as weapon of war and a tactic of genocide. What is less known is that each tribunal found one woman guilty of such crimes, among other atrocities— a history essential for understanding how the international community should approach the cases of ISIS women.
The International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia (ICTY) judgement for Biljana Plavsic, former president of the Republika Srpska, includes several references to gender-based violence that took place during the conflict as examples of the gravity of war crimes that she oversaw. In the section on legal practices in Yugoslavia, which the court was required to consult as part of its sentencing determination, “compulsion to prostitution or rape” is included as one of the offenses cited.
The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) found Pauline Nyiramasuhuko, former Rwandan Minister for Family and Women’s Development, guilty of a “crime against humanity (rape) and a serious violation of Article 3 common to the Geneva Conventions and of Additional Protocol II (outrages upon personal dignity)” for “failing to prevent and punish rapes.” The ICTR judgement noted that she also ordered others to commit acts of sexual violence. She is the only woman to have ever been convicted of rape as a weapon of war.
These trials established two important precedents: first, that female perpetrators could be held responsible for systemic violence against entire groups of women, and second, that such responsibility could constitute an component of broader charges of genocide and crimes against humanity. While the women of ISIS were not decision-makers, many of them were perpetrators of atrocities. They must be recognized and tried as such—not allowed to escape justice.