ISLAMIC STATE: "VIRGIN. BEAUTIFUL. 12 YEARS OLD.... HER PRICE HAS REACHED$12,500"

July 6, 2016 Daniel Greenfield




Revive should be in quotation marks because as a practical matter, slavery lingered on in some countries. Andthis sophisticated system that we see ISIS making use of resembles the Saudi slave system, which was only officially abolished in 1962, but which continues on in much the same way by preventing women from leaving the country and conducting the trade over social media.

The posting in Arabic is chilling. A girl for sale: "Virgin. Beautiful. 12 years old.... Her price has reached $12,500 and she will be sold soon."

The advertisement, along with others for kittens, tactical gear and weapons, appeared on an encrypted Telegram app and was shared with The Associated Press by an activist with Iraq's persecuted Yazidi community, which is trying to free an estimated 3,000 women and girls still held as sex slaves by IS extremists.

As the Islamic State group loses control of one city after another in its self-styled caliphate, it is tightening its grip on its captives, taking the Yazidis deeper into its territory and selling them as chattel on popular encrypted apps such as Telegram and WhatsApp, The Associated Press has found.

The extremists are targeting smugglers who rescue captives for assassination and are deploying a slave database with captives' photos and owners' names to prevent escape through checkpoints.

As the AP takes a closer look at the system of slavery, it appears quite sophisticated. It's fashionable to dismiss ISIS as a bunch of crazed lunatics, but this is an integrated state based system using modern technology.

ISIS is evil, much as Nazi Germany or Iran, but it's not a tiny minority of anything.

Mirza Danai, founder of the German-Iraqi aid organization Luftbrucke Irak, said the slave database documents the captives as if they were property.

"They register every slave, every person under their owner, and therefore if she escapes, every Daesh control or checkpoint, or security force - they know that this girl ... has escaped from this owner," said Danai, using a common acronym to refer to IS.

It took Islam to revive slavery. Let's see someone make a movie about that.

Islamic State: "Virgin. Beautiful. 12 years old.... Her price has reached $12,500"