Balki Souley, 14, in the village of Kwassaw, Niger, on June 17, 2012. Two days earlier, doctors said at the time, she lost her baby because of her age and the fact that she had eaten very little during her pregnancy because of Niger’s hunger crisis. (Sudarsan Raghavan/The Washington Post)
I met Fayrouz Ahmed Haider in a grim refugee camp in Yemen. Just 11 years old, she was already married. She reminded me of someone else: a girl I had met thousands of miles away in the West African nation of Niger.
Her name was Balki Souley. Like Fayrouz, she had also been married off as a child.
I met Balki in the summer of 2012. She had just lost her son during childbirth, and her body was frail, so weakened by hunger, that she nearly died herself. Balki was 14 then. She was married at 12.
At the time, Balki’s father was struggling to scrape together enough money to take care of his 15-member family. There wasn’t nearly enough to feed them.
“Sometimes we had food, sometimes we didn’t eat,” he said. “Whenever we had leftovers, we gave them to Balki. If her hunger wasn’t satisfied, there’s nothing we could do.”
Then, as it is the case now, Niger has the world’s highest rate of child marriage. Back then, a hunger crisis was affecting millions of people across the Sahel region. Humanitarian agencies were concerned that more and more desperate parents would marry off their daughters for the dowries they fetch to ensure their family’s survival.
In Yemen, the civil war is doing just that.
11-year-old Fayrouz Ahmed Haider. Her father married her to a 25-year-old man to help pay for her mother’s hospital bills. (Sudarsan Raghavan/The Washington Post)
In Balki, I saw Fayrouz’s potential future. Fayrouz was married off to a 25-year-old man, and his dowry was used for medical treatment for her mother and to pay off debts. But when the man tried to have sex with her, Fayrouz ran away. But she intends to go back to her husband, not least because her struggling family needs the rest of the dowry, which will be paid only when she returns.
“He calls me every day,” Fayrouz told me, referring to her husband. “He asks me when I’ll come back.”
“I tell him I won’t come back until I am old enough,” she continued.
When I asked when that will be, Fayrouz replied:
“After a year of two, I will go back to him.”
That would make her around the same age when Balki became pregnant and subsequently lost her child.
Islamic State sex slaves apparently being sold on Facebook for $8,000
A Yazidi who had been held by Islamic State militants as a slave for several months sits in a tent outside Duhok, Iraq. (Alice Martins, For The Washington Post)
The woman is young, perhaps 18, with olive skin and dark bangs that droop onto her face. In the Facebook photo, she attempts to smile but doesn’t look at her photographer.
“To all the bros thinking about buying a slave, this one is $8,000,” begins the May 20 Facebook posting, which was attributed to an Islamic State fighter who calls himself Abu Assad Almani. The same man posted a second image a few hours later, this one a pale young face with weepy red eyes.
“Another sabiyah [slave], also about $8,000,” the posting reads. “Yay, or nay?”
The photos were taken down within hours by Facebook, and it is unclear whether the account’s owner was doing the selling himself or commenting about women being sold by other fighters. But the unusual posting underscores what experts say is an increasingly perilous existence for the hundreds of women who are thought to be held as sex slaves by the Islamic State.
As the terrorist group comes under heightened pressure in Iraq and Syria, these female captives appear to be suffering, too — sold and traded by cash-strapped fighters, subjected to shortages of food and medicine, and put at risk daily by military strikes, according to terrorism experts and human rights groups.
Social-media sites used by Islamic State fighters in recent months have included numerous accounts of the buying and selling of sex slaves, as well the promulgation of formal rules for dealing with them. The guidelines cover such topics as whether it’s possible to have sex with prepubescent prisoners — yes, the Islamic State’s legal experts say — and how severely a slave can be beaten.
But until the May 20 incident, there were no known instances of Islamic State fighters posting photographs of female captives being offered for sale. The photos of the two unidentified women appeared only briefly before being deleted by Facebook, but the images were captured by the Middle East Media Research Institute, a Washington nonprofit group that monitors jihadists’ social-media accounts.
“We have seen a great deal of brutality, but the content that ISIS has been disseminating over the past two years has surpassed it all for sheer evil,” said Steven Stalinsky, the institute’s executive director, using the common acronym for the Islamic State. “Sales of slave girls on social media is just one more example of this.”
Almani, the apparent owner of the Facebook account, is thought to be a German national fighting for the Islamic State in Syria, according to Stalinsky. He has previously posted to social-media accounts under that name, in the slangy, poorly rendered English used by many European fighters who can’t speak Arabic. Early postings suggest that Almani is intimately familiar with the Islamic State’s activities around Raqqa, the group’s de facto capital in Syria. He also regularly uses his accounts to solicit donations for the terrorist group.
In displaying the images of the women, Almani advised his Facebook friends to “get married” and “come to dawlah,” or the Islamic State’s territory in Iraq and Syria. Then he engaged with different commenters in an extensive discussion about whether the $8,000 asking price was a good value. Some who replied to the postings mocked the women’s looks, while others scolded Almani for posting photos of women who weren’t wearing the veil.
“What makes her worth that price? Does she have an exceptional skill?” one of his correspondents asks about woman in the second photo.
“Nope,” he replies. “Supply and demand makes her that price.”
The Islamic State’s leaders have historically used U.S.-based social media such as Facebook and Twitter to attract recruits and spread propaganda, but in the past year American companies have sought to block jihadist accounts and postings whenever they are discovered.
Facebook in particular has garnered high marks from watchdog groups for reacting quickly to terrorists’ efforts to use its pages. But at the same time, the militants also have become more agile, leaping quickly from one social-media platform to another and opening new accounts as soon as older ones are shut down.
Displaced Iraqi women from the Yazidi community, who fled violence between Islamic State jihadists and Peshmerga fighters in the northern Iraqi town of Sinjar, gathering around their tents at a refugee camp set up on Mount Sinjar in Jan. 2015. (Safin Hamed / AFP/Getty Images)
The Facebook incident comes amid complaints from human rights groups about waning public interest in the plight of women held as prisoners by the Islamic State. The organization Human Rights Watch, citing estimates by Kurdish officials in Iraq and Syria, says the terrorist group holds about 1,800 women and girls, just from the capture of Yazidi towns in the region. After initial denials, the Islamic State last year issued statements acknowledging the use of sex slaves and defending the practice as consistent with ancient Islamic traditions, provided that the women are non-Muslims captured in battle or members of Muslim sects that the terrorist group regards as apostates. At least three Somali families in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area have female relatives who have gone missing in…
A report last month by Human Rights Watch recounted the ordeals suffered by three dozen Iraqi and Syrian women who escaped from terrorist-held towns in recent months. Among the women were former Yazidi sex slaves who described abuses that included multiple rapes by different men as they were sold and traded.
The problems faced by such women appear to be growing worse as military and economic pressure against the Islamic State increases, the report said.
“The longer they are held by ISIS, the more horrific life becomes for Yazidi women, bought and sold, brutally raped, their children torn from them,” said Skye Wheeler, women’s rights emergencies researcher at Human Rights Watch. “Meanwhile, ISIS’s restrictions on [non-enslaved] Sunni women cut them off from normal life and services almost entirely.”
This photo shows the incredible firepower of the US-led coalition against ISIS
In the photo, soldiers and airmen from the international coalition to thwart ISIS stand in front of some of the most powerful military aircraft in the world. From left to right, we see a U-2 spy plane, a KC-10 tanker, an F-15 Eagle, an F-18 jet in front of an E-3, a KC-30A tanker, an F-22 Raptor, and an RQ-4 Global Hawk drone. From left to right, we see a U-2 spy plane, a KC-10 tanker, an F-15 Eagle, an F-18 jet in front of an E-3, a KC-30A tanker, an F-22 Raptor, and an RQ-4 Global Hawk drone.
Colonel Steve Warren, the US-led coalition’s Operation Inherent Resolve spokesman, said the recent attacks by militants of the Islamic State (ISIS) against the Kurdish Peshmerga front lines in northern Iraq last Tuesday that also killed one US serviceman, was to gain attention after suffering “several defeats in a row”.
“This enemy [ISIS] has been getting slapped around now by both the CTS, the Iraqi security forces and the Peshmerga for weeks,” Colonel Warren told a press conference on Wednesday. “They’re being pressured, their noses have been bloodied and they’ve continued to become battered around Makhmur. They were out of Bashir [village] by the Peshmerga,” he added.
“It’s an area [Bashir] that they used to launch indirect fire attacks against Kirkuk, it’s an area that they used to launch chemical weapons attacks against Taza that killed three children several months ago and the Peshmerga came in and took it away from them, unceremoniously took it away from them in a relatively quick fight. It took about 24 hours,” he said.
“This enemy has suffered a string of recent defeats. They were kicked out of Hiit, they’ve been cleared out of the roadway between Hiit and Dulab, they’re being pressured into Dulab,” Warren stated.
“So this enemy has suffered a string of defeats recently, and one of the things that we’ve noticed that what ISIL [ISIS] likes to do is when they have suffered several defeats in a row, when they’re back on their heels, often they will try one of these more high-profile, high-visibility attacks in an effort to gain some attention,” he said.
“This enemy wanted to stage a relatively high-profile, high-visibility attack that would distract peoples’ attention away from the beatdown that they’ve been taking everywhere else. Luckily for us, it won’t work,” he said, suggesting that ISIS is on the back foot, and that the latest attacks have no “lasting operational value to this enemy”.
The US-led coalition spokesperson also referred to the ISIS-led complex attack on December 16, 2015, near the town of Tal Aswad against Kurdish Peshmerga forces, that included hundreds of ISIS fighters and several VBIEDs.
“It was, we believe, in reaction to the fact that they were in the process of losing Ramadi. What this enemy likes to do is when they’re — when they’re taking a beatdown, they like to try and stage some noticeable event that would distract the press, particularly the Western press who are very vulnerable to distraction in their view,” he stated.
Moreover, Warren said that when ISIS suffers setbacks, it carries out attacks on civilians in other parts of the world. In November, when the Kurdish forces took Sinjar, the ISIS operatives attacked Paris.
“We also know that when this enemy is on its heels, when it’s suffered several setbacks, they’re likely to try and lash out, you know, through terror attacks, perhaps in Baghdad, perhaps elsewhere in Syria, perhaps elsewhere in the world,” the coalition spokesperson added.
The Giant Al Qaeda Defeat That No One’s Talking About
Something significant and positive just happened in the Middle East, and most Americans are not aware of it. The United Arab Emirates, under the banner of a Saudi-led coalition, late last month delivered a major blow to the most lethal Al Qaeda group on the planet—Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), the primary Islamic extremist group operating in Yemen.
The Sunni Gulf states are often painted in the Western media as shying away from a fight, not being capable of a fight and not willing to deal with terrorists and extremists in their midst. The UAE operation in Yemen proved that none of these characterizations are true of Abu Dhabi.
AQAP has long been, and still is, a threat to the American homeland. The past three attempted terrorist attacks in the United States by an outside group were conducted by AQAP—the 2009 attempt to bring down an airliner flying to Detroit by the so-called underwear bomber, the 2010 attempt to bring down U.S.-flagged cargo planes flying from the Middle East to the United States by hiding bombs in printer cartridges, and the 2011 plot to bring down a civilian airliner flying to the United States with a sophisticated suicide vest containing no metallic parts.
These plots resulted from the extensive safe haven that AQAP then enjoyed in Yemen. In 2012 and 2013, military operations by the Yemeni government, supported by U.S. counterterrorism operations, eliminated that safe haven and removed numerous AQAP leaders from the battlefield. But a civil war in Yemen that began in 2014 created a power vacuum that gave AQAP new life. Early last year, the group seized a large amount of territory, garnered thousands of new recruits, acquired caches of weapons and raised new revenues.
In the civil war, the Saudi-led coalition has been fighting on the side of the internationally recognized government of Yemen and its president, Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi. The coalition is fighting against an Iranian-backed Yemeni militant group called the Houthis that had swept across the country in 2014, capturing the capital, Sanaa, in September 2014. The focus of the coalition has been fighting the Houthis, but over the past five months it has quietly turned its attention to the growing threat of AQAP, culminating in last month’s major operation.
On the weekend of April 23-24, the Emirati military, with the support of the Yemeni military and local Yemeni tribes, seized from AQAP the strategically important city of Mukalla and the surrounding area. Mukalla, Yemen’s fifth-largest city, hosts the country’s second largest port—from which AQAP was earning substantial revenues by taxing the shipment of goods there. The city was to be the center of AQAP’s Islamic emirate in Yemen. Its loss is a major blow to AQAP. It is the equivalent of the Islamic State losing Mosul or Raqqa.
The military operation was well planned and executed. The Emiratis worked with local Yemeni tribes to secure their support for the operation, and the Emiratis trained a cadre of Yemeni soldiers to assist in the operation. The attack itself involved choreographed air, naval and ground operations. The operation, which some thought would take weeks, took only days. And now the coalition is shifting to operations to ensure that AQAP cannot return—to include the establishment of good governance in the area. It is a textbook solution of dealing with terrorist groups that hold territory.
Degrading AQAP was in the interests of the Saudis and the Emiratis. The two countries are the primary targets of AQAP in the region. But the degradation of the group is also in the national security interests of the United States since the homeland remains target No. 1 for AQAP outside the region.
Thus, the implications of the Emirati operation are significant. It is the kind of military capability and willingness to act against terrorists that should become a model for other countries in the region. It is the kind of action that the United States should support—both with tangible assistance and public statements. And, it is the approach to dealing with terrorists holding territory that will work against other extremist groups, including the Islamic State, winning the support of local tribes, training local Sunni forces to take the fight to the enemy, and fighting ourselves where necessary.
Saudi Arabia passes Russia as world’s third biggest military spender
Members of Saudi security forces take part in a military parade in preparation for the annual Hajj pilgrimage. (SPA)
Global military spending reached almost $1.7 trillion in 2015, marking a year-on-year increase for the first time since 2011, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, which tracks arms expenditure around the world.
The United States remained far and away the top spender, which despite a dip from 2014, accounted for more than a third of total global spending. It was followed by China and then, perhaps surprisingly, Saudi Arabia, which supplanted Russia in third place. (The figure for China in the chart below is based on a SIPRI estimate.)
Global military spending reached almost $1.7 trillion in 2015, marking a year-on-year increase for the first time since 2011, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, which tracks arms expenditure around the world.
The United States remained far and away the top spender, which despite a dip from 2014, accounted for more than a third of total global spending. It was followed by China and then, perhaps surprisingly, Saudi Arabia, which supplanted Russia in third place. (The figure for China in the chart below is based on a SIPRI estimate.)
“Military spending in 2015 presents contrasting trends,” said Sam Perlo-Freeman, head of SIPRI’s military expenditure project, in a statement. “On the one hand, spending trends reflect the escalating conflict and tension in many parts of the world; on the other hand, they show a clear break from the oil-fueled surge in military spending of the past decade. This volatile economic and political situation creates an uncertain picture for the years to come.”
