Seized documents reveal ISIS’s aim to justify sex slavery

Islamic State theologians have issued an extremely detailed ruling on when “owners” of women enslaved by the extremist group can have sex with them, in an apparent bid to curb what they called violations in the treatment of captured females. The ruling, or fatwa, was among documents captured by U.S. forces during a May raid targeting a top ISIS official in Syria. It sheds new light on how the group is trying to reinterpret centuries-old teachings to justify the rape of women in the swaths of Syria and Iraq it controls.

This really kind of brings it out — the level of bureaucratization, organization, the diwans, the committees.

Brett McGurk, President Obama’s special envoy

Far from trying to conceal the practice, the Islamic State has boasted about it and established a department of “war spoils” to manage slavery. Among the fatwa’s injunctions are bans on a father and son having sex with the same female slave and on the owner of a mother and daughter having sex with both. The United Nations and human rights groups have accused the Islamic State of the systematic abduction and rape of thousands of women and girls as young as 12, especially members of the Yazidi minority in northern Iraq. Many have been given to fighters as a reward or sold as sex slaves.