ISIS fighters are reportedly forcing birth control on female slaves to keep their sex trade running. The practice has been widespread among ISIS members in order to conform to the medieval Islamic codes stating that female captives must not be pregnant when raped.
An investigative report of The New York Times revealed that ISIS fighters are exploiting modern birth control methods in order to maintain their supply of sex slaves. With this, they may be able to rape their female captives repeatedly and continue selling them to fellow fighters.
The newspaper has cited interviews with 37 Yazidi women who managed to escape from their captors. Many of the women revealed that they were forced to take birth control pills or be injected with the Depro-Provera hormonal contraceptive to avoid pregnancy. Moreover, one of the women was aggressively forced to have a painful abortion so that she will continue to be available for sex.
Some women also disclosed to the newspaper that when they were taken to the slave markets in the Sinjar region of Iraq, buyers would often require sellers to show proofs that their captives were not pregnant. Some fighters would even bring their own gynecologists to support that their captives were not impregnated.
New York Times attributed the unspoken rule of the Islamic State in keeping its captives pregnancy-free to the centuries-old rulings implicating that an owner can only rape his female slave if she is not pregnant. The slave should undergo istibra, a process of ensuring that the womb is empty.
The practice of forcing birth control among sex slaves was believed to be the reason why there is a very low pregnancy rate among the Yazidi women. Only five percent of the rape victims got pregnant during their enslavement.
United Nations reported in January that up to 3,500 people are being held as slaves by the Islamic State militants. Most of these slaves are Yazidi women and children. The report also stated that from January 2014 to October 2015, at least 18,802 civilians were killed in violence and 36,245 civilians were wounded.
