With Ash on Their Faces by Cathy Otten

Author:Cathy Otten
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science
Publisher: OR Books
Published: 2017-10-24T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 8

“All those ISIS motherfuckers are no good”

Zahra was locked in Abu Tabuq’s house in Raqqa. The house next door was full of weapons and ammunition and was one of five large armories across the city. Abu Tabuq was a twenty-nine-year-old man with long hair and a thin, light-colored beard. He made her clean the house and wash his clothes, while he worked at an Islamic State center that distributed weapons to fighters.

At first he was cruel and raped her, but when she began to obey his orders, he was a little kinder toward her. He explained that her conversion to Islam was dependent on an ISIS member “marrying” (raping) her, after which she would become a true Muslim. “Fuck their mother’s religion!” she said angrily when recounting this, her eyes flaring. “Even when I was praying in the Islamic way I would pray to my own religion inside. When I was in front of them I would say what they liked, but if they weren’t there I would do it my way.”

She survived by retaining the belief that she would go back to her own religion eventually. “I never took their advice—it went in one ear and out the other.” Abu Tabuq told her to forget about her past, her family, and her religion: “The only thing you have to care about is me,” he said.

If she didn’t obey him he would beat her. As a member of ISIS, he had been morally corrupted and wasn’t capable of being truly kind, she explained. “Sometimes he brought me clothes that were full of blood to wash.” She washed the bloodstained clothes three, four times, trying to remove the stains from what were probably the clothes of dead fighters.

“All those ISIS motherfuckers are no good. Because of those bastards many young Yezidi girls have killed themselves.

“They could do anything they liked with us, we were just like sheep. Compare my case to others and I didn’t go through a lot. Yes, I was bought and sold but in other cases they were bought and sold maybe fifteen times.”

She had been in Raqqa for around four months, mostly spent in Abu Tabuq’s house, when he sold her to Abu Mawa, a thirty-eight-year-old Libyan ISIS fighter living in Deir ez-Zor in eastern Syria. Abu Mawa drove her from Raqqa in a yellow taxi.

When they arrived, he gave her revealing clothes to put on for him. She refused, and as punishment, he broke her leg with a metal bar.

The next day, for her impertinence, Abu Mawa sold her to another Libyan fighter known as Abu Adafa. He was only eighteen years old. He was living in the same compound full of caravans near the Conoco gas processing plant, south of Deir ez-Zor, where many Libyan ISIS fighters were based at the time. He was so young that he couldn’t grow a moustache, and rather than raping and beating her like the other fighters, he decided that it was his mission to convert her to Islam and teach her about the message of the Koran.

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