Has anybody bothered to notice the real war on women being waged in the Middle East?

While self absorbed American feminists screech loudly about how sexist the new Jurassic Park movie is, or — for the 4,538,050 time — about the unfair wage gap in America today, word about a new U.N report that probes the Islamic State’s sex atrocities hit the mainstream and left many wondering why American feminists are so silent on the issue.

Frankly, it left me wondering why all of us are so silent on the issue.

I’ve only gotten just a small taste of the world outside our borders. I travelled to a little village in Togo, West Africa last August, and what I witnessed there changed my life. I’d seen the gut wrenching photos in National Geographic and Time Magazine growing up, I’d even heard stories from missionaries about the blessing of just a tall glass of clean water or a pillow on which to lay my exhausted head at night. But absolutely nothing could have prepared me for what I saw before our plane ever even touched the ground in Lome, Togo.

Maybe that’s the problem with what’s going on in the Middle East. We hear the horrific stories, we even see photos of girls and women whose eyes are haunted by a life we can’t even imagine, and we simply don’t have the capacity to wrap our brains around what is actually going on.

That, or maybe we just don’t want to, because knowing is hard…and once we know, figuring out what to do about it is harder still.

Since 2009, the United Nations has been conducting an investigation of war torn countries, specifically looking at atrocities committed against women and children. Zainab Bangura, the lead investigator, recently returned from a fact finding mission in Syria, Iraq, Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan, and she reports that the Islamic State (also known as IS or ISIS) has taken sex crimes against women to an entirely new level. Included in her investigation were the women from Yazidi, along with Christian and Turkmen Shia minorities.

“After attacking a village, IS splits women from men and executes boys and men aged 14 and over. The women and mothers are separated; girls are stripped naked, tested for virginity and examined for breast size and prettiness. The youngest, and those considered the prettiest virgins fetch higher prices and are sent to Raqqa, the IS stronghold.

There is a hierarchy: sheikhs get first choice, then emirs, then fighters. They often take three or four girls each and keep them for a month or so, until they grow tired of a girl, when she goes back to market. At slave auctions, buyers haggle fiercely, driving down prices by disparaging girls as flat-chested or unattractive.

We heard about one girl who was traded 22 times, and another, who had escaped, told us that the sheikh who had captured her wrote his name on the back of her hand to show that she was his ‘property’.”

When asked if ISIS is organized, Bangura responded decisively.

“IS is organised, coordinated and operates on a widespread and systematic basis to commit a staggering array of atrocities. They are institutionalising sexual violence; the brutalisation of women and girls is central to their ideology. They use sexual violence as a “tactic of terrorism” to advance key strategic priorities, such as recruitment, fundraising, to enforce discipline and order – through the punishment of dissenters or family members – and to advance their radical ideology.

They commit rape, sexual slavery, forced prostitution and other acts of extreme brutality. We heard one case of a 20-year-old girl who was burned alive because she refused to perform an extreme sex act. We learned of many other sadistic sexual acts. We struggled to understand the mentality of people who commit such crimes.”

Apparently something exists called “sexual jihad.” Parents give their daughters to ISIS to support the war, and their contribution to the war is to marry an ISIS soldier and cater to his every need, both sexual and otherwise.

“Most women get enslaved when their villages are attacked. We were also informed of parents who had given away their daughters to IS, particularly in Mosul. To understand this, we must examine the concept of jihad al-nikah, or sexual jihad – whereby women’s bodies are used as part of supporting the IS campaign. There are tens of thousands of men who expect that they will “get” women to “marry”. A woman’s contribution is to marry them and cater for them in many ways, including sexually. IS men may have a wife, as well as several slaves. We heard few stories of wives who helped the slaves to escape.”

Some women are able to escape the terror…others aren’t so fortunate.

“Some are released when a ransom is paid. When parents or community leaders are informed about the whereabouts of the women and girls, they would raise money – as much as $5,000 – and use an intermediary to “buy” the girls back.

Yazidi communities have suffered discrimination for a long time and have strong social networks. It is a closed and conservative community and recent events have been a real shock to them. But they show resilience and impressive coping mechanisms, including a willingness to welcome girls back.

Of course, not everyone escapes. When IS discovered girls used their headscarves to hang themselves, they forced them to remove them. I learned of three girls who tried to commit suicide by drinking rat poison, which had been left in a room. They started vomiting and were rushed to hospital and washed out. When they came back, they were brutally attacked.”

When asked if women are getting the support they need once they escape, Bangura clearly struggled to answer. She explained that families do support them, but the needs are far beyond what family alone can meet. Just imagine the often extensive psychological and medical assistance needed after the kind of abuse they are suffering.

“I met one woman who was in shock – most of her family had either been taken or killed. She was looking after her four-year-old son and trying to track down her 15-year-old daughter, who was taken by IS. She was so traumatised that she insisted her husband was missing, although he was dead.”

Officials told her they’re struggling to keep up with the number of refugees flooding out of Syria and Iraq. The U.N. is providing assistance, but it’s far from adequate. Help is needed.

“It was painful for me,” explained Bangura. “The countries I have worked on include Bosnia, Congo, South Sudan, Somalia and Central African Republic; I never saw anything like this. I cannot understand such inhumanity. I was sick, I couldn’t understand.”

Her last comment was most telling. While the left seems to try and downplay the threat that ISIS poses to the region and the world, Bangura explained that the threat is very real, and that the enemy must be defeated.

“In addition to the military intervention and the sanctions tools that we have, we need first to tackle their access to communication means including social media that they use to terrorise communities and the whole world and attract new recruits. Information is its oxygen - we must suffocate them. Their tactic is to destroy individuals, communities, laws and society and build a medieval social order. We also need to use economic divestments to halt IS sources of income and supply lines. We must also explain the scope of the atrocities being committed, and look at accountability, which is difficult in the context of more than 40,000 fighters from more than 100 countries. We need to look at jurisdiction – does it fall under Iraq? Syria? We cannot only react emotionally, we must understand their tactics and defeat them.”

The comment section under the article I reference is evidence enough, what’s going on in the Middle East is merely a joke to many Americans. Sadly, whether we admit it or not, the evidence doesn’t lie. We’re dealing with an enemy that openly mocks the petty problems we whine about in this country…an enemy busy raping and impregnating 9-year-old girls and beheading 14-year-old boys just for the fun of it. An enemy already within our own borders, lying in wait.

What more is there to say? Will the evidence Bangura and her team uncovered be enough to finally cause feminists — or for that matter, most of America — to wake from the selfishness that infects us, and pay attention to the real war on women being waged in the Middle East?

Image courtesy of AFP