Flogging, stoning, constant surveillance – female members of the police that enforced ISIL law tell their stories.
Don’t get confused. These women are not victims.
In the first of a five-part series of accounts exploring what life was like for women living under the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, or ISIS) in Syria and Iraq, two women who worked as torturers for ISIL’s religious police share their stories.
Aisha’s story – Raqqa, Syria: ‘That was our job, torturing people’
My name is Aisha. In ISIL, they called me Um Qaqaa. I lived in Raqqa.
I went to ISIL to explain my situation to them. My husband was a martyr. I had no more money. I had no choice but to work for them.
I started the paperwork to join but they said first I needed training in Sharia law. During the training, they taught us to recite the Quran. There were about 30 or 40 women. The mosque was full of trainees. And you had to recite it again and again until you passed the exam. It took me three months to pass.
Some of the women were illiterate. They did not know how to read or write. They flogged them to make them learn. Some of them never succeeded so they kept them in prison.
