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"Till Martyrdom Do Us Part"

(Washington Post) Kevin Sullivan - In Islamic State propaganda, life for women in the caliphate is filled with love, children and the joys of domestic life. But the reality is often far more harsh for women who have moved there from the Arab world, Europe or the U.S., according to specialists who monitor Islamic State social media. Those women, drawn by romantic notions of supporting revolutionaries and living in a state that exalts their religion, can quickly find themselves part of an institutionalized, near-assembly-line system to provide fighters with wives, sex and children. And when their husbands are killed, they are expected to celebrate their "martyrdom" and then quickly marry other fighters. According to interviews with women whose cities and towns have been overtaken by the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, the militants would use any pretext to detain women: "They use the women prisoners for wives for the foreign fighters. If you go to prison, you are given away to God-only-knows who." One woman described what happened to a neighbor's daughter, who had been jailed because her husband was a soldier in the Syrian army. "They told her, 'Either you marry a fighter, or we will cut off your head and hang it in the square.' So she married the fighter."
2015-10-09 00:00:00
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