Honouring Islamic Principles

"One should remember that enslaving the families of the [nonbelievers] and taking their women as concubines is a firmly established aspect of Islamic law." 
"Their creed is so deviant from the truth that even cross-worshipping Christians for ages considered them devil worshippers and Satanists."
"The enslaved Yazidi families are now sold by the Islamic State soldiers. After capture, the Yazidi women and children were then divided according to the Sharia amongst the fighters of the Islamic State."
Islamic State magazine, Dabiq

"In every place where Yazidi women or families are held, jihadists come and randomly select women that they take away. A final total above 7,000 is perfectly feasible."
Matthew Barber, scholar of Yazidi history, University of Chicago

Islamic State jihadists say they sell enslaved Yazidi women for as little as $US1000 ($1142) to use as concubines. Photo: AP

The Islamic State propaganda magazine has given the world notice that Yazidi women and children represent spoils of war. Captured as the fanatical jihadists marched into their ancient towns and villages in Iraq, thousands of women and children are suffering unspeakable atrocities, and considered in their vulnerable state to be valuable as livestock used for breeding purposes. Hundreds of thousands of Yazidis, an offshoot of Kurds, practising pre-monotheistic religious rites were made homeless by the Islamic State advance.

Targets for Islamic State ... Yazidi Iraqi women walk at the Bajid Kandala camp near the Tigris River, in Kurdistan's western Dohuk province, where they took refuge after fleeing advances by IS jihadists in Iraq. Photo: AFP

Young women and teenage girls in their thousands were separated from their families, while thousands of Yazidi men were slaughtered, many beheaded, and many more desperately fled to the mountain behind their Sinjar area of northern Iraq, last August. It was the Kurds of Syria and Iraq who came to their rescue, helping the tens of thousands of Yazidis who had fled their towns and villages with the advance of the Islamic State in fear for their lives, finding themselves stranded on the mountain, starving.

Those who had fled the Sinjar area had described men being massacred, and hundreds of women and children taken by the marauders. Dabiq described how the women and children were divided among fighters, in accordance with Islamic law. In an article contained in the magazine, it was stated that Christians and Jews, in reflection of the Koranic canon, can be offered the opportunity to save their lives by paying a tax or through conversion. Yazidis, though, are not accorded those privileges.

The men are murdered, because their religious devotion is anathema to Islamists, while the women and children are enslaved, captured during a conflict, reflecting the very historical advance of Islam during its formative years when it embarked on a far-reaching odyssey to spread the faith by the scimitar, claiming the Middle East as its own, and advancing into Europe to proselytize in their inimitably violent manner, increasing the numbers of the faithful and their geographic domination.

Human Rights Watch based in New York interviewed some Yazidi women who carefully avoided admitting they had been raped, and for reason enough, since the shame of having been a victim of sexual assault is a stigmatizing factor in the deeply conservative sect. One woman who was interviewed by them stated she had experienced seeing "brides" taken from a school and a prison that she had been held in. "Some were as young as 12 or 13, and up to age 20", she affirmed.

"The Islamic State's litany of horrific crimes against the Yazidis in Iraq only keeps growing", Fred Abrahams, a special adviser at Human Rights Watch said. Islamic State jihadis are faithful to the traditions of historical Islam. They are intent on putting into practise precisely what the history of Islam's development and inexorable spread reveals. And in the process treating those whom they conquer in the very same manner their forbears did.

Islamic State consider themselves authentic Islam reborn. And with that authenticity comes the obligation to Islam to obey the major precepts of the responsibility of all Muslims to convert those without the faith to a presence within the faith. Conversion is a triumph. One which does not necessarily confer responsibility of the inductor toward the inductee. Which is why Islamic State sees no reason why it should not behead foreign abductees whether or not they convert to Islam.