Amar, an Islamic jihadist with ISIS shares how he killed over 900 people and raped over 250 women, many of them just young teenage girls.
A BBC reporter, Stacey Dooly, and a former Yazidi sex slave named Shireen, sit face-to-face with an Islamic fighter who used the Quran to attack Christians and Yazidi people in 2014. During an extremely revealing interview, Amar admitted how he repeatedly raped young girls on a daily basis.
“With my hand, the number of people I killed…about 900 people. Something like that,” Amar said, with zero remorse for the hundreds of people he brutally murdered.
“How many children do you think you have raped over the years?” Stacy asks Amar.
Amar paused and thought about it for a moment and answered, “the 15 and 16 year olds?” He said, trying to recall. “Maybe about 50,” he said with a slight smirk on his face, “but I raped over 200.”
Shireen, a Yazidi woman who was kept as a slave in Mosul before managing to escape during the battle to regain the city, was able to confront Amar face-to-face to get answers for why he did what he did.
Shireen knows first-hand what Amar did to his victims because she too was captured by Islamists, held hostage and routinely raped by her captor while his wife looked on. Shireen showed the BBC one of the former locations where Muslims set up markets to buy and sell Christian and Yazidi women.
The Quran, which Muslims believe to have been revealed by God to the Prophet Muhammad, permits Muslims to take the women as their sex slaves. According to the Quran, non-Muslim women captured during war, like Christians and Yazidis, do not have the right to grant or deny sexual access to themselves. Instead, the Quran permits men to have sexual access to “what their right hands possess,” meaning female captives or slaves (Q. 23.5-6; 70.29-30).
Though this Quranic teaching is denied by many modern day Muslims, especially those living in the west, it was however widely accepted and practiced among early Muslims as well as the Prophet Muhammad himself. The Prophet Muhammad, for example, kept a slave-concubine (Mariya the Copt).
Traditional Islamic law (fiqh) elaborates significantly on how to buy and sell slaves. While it is not permissible to enslave other Muslims, or even those who convert to Islam after enslavement, it is lawful to buy and sell non-Muslim women and use them as sex slaves.
Christian minorities often experience brutal abuse for their faith and this interview with Amar is a reminder that we cannot forget to pray for them and expose the atrocities that they face.
