Islamic State militants have executed 19 women who refused to have sex with the fighters, a Kurdish official said.
The women were being held hostage in the militant group’s stronghold in Mosul, Iraq, which the terror group took over last June, and they were purportedly killed just a few days ago, The Daily Mail reported.
They were executed because they refused to “participate in the practice of sexual jihad,” a spokesman for the Kurdish Democratic Party in Mosul told Iraqi News.
Zainab Bangura, a U.N. envoy investigating the group’s sex trade told Bloomberg the captured girls “get peddled like barrels of petrol” and some girls are bought by multiple men.
“Sometimes these fighters sell the girls back to their families for thousands of dollars of ransom,” Ms. Bangura said.
She also confirmed a document linked to the jihadist group that suggests the extremist fighters sell the Yazidi and Christian women and children they have abducted, with young girls between the ages of one and nine fetching the highest price, the envoy said.
The document described the abducted women as “items” and claimed a decrease in demand of “women and cattle” affected “Islamic State revenues as well as the funding of mujahideen in the battlefield,” the Daily Mail reported.
The militants stormed the Sinjar district in northern Iraq last year and captured hundreds of Yazidi women, whom the Islamists consider heretics.
It is not clear whether the 19 women were Yazidis or not.
• Kellan Howell can be reached at khowell@washingtontimes.com.
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