Unfortunately this book is very expensive but I’m really glad that I made the choice to buy it back in January because it was so interesting to me. Since I bought it I have read it twice. I’ve been down a terrorism rabbit hole for a year and a half, focusing mainly on ISIS/Daesh/Islamic State, and have read many books about it. In this one, the author interviewed 63 local Syrian and Iraqi women, both Sunni Muslims and Yazidis, who were not part of ISIS but whose communities were occupied by ISIS. The stories of how they coped with the occupation (and, in the cases of the Yazidi women, enslavement) were fascinating.

You have to understand that ISIS was not just a terrorist organization, it was a state-building project. They set up a whole system of government, took over public services. There were official ISIS hospitals and clinics, ISIS landlords, ISIS judges, etc. It was a whole other world.

Some anecdotes from the book, to give you an idea of what you’ll see:

1. One woman decided, once ISIS arrived, that she was never going to leave the house again until they left. That’s basically what ISIS wanted women to do anyway, stay indoors. It was dangerous to be out and about for a multitude of reasons. If the multiple layers of your niqab slipped or something and someone saw your eyes, you could get arrested. So the woman stayed indoors and embarked on a years-long private study, reading all sorts of books, teaching herself a foreign language, etc, trying to make the best of the situation.
2. An enslaved Yazidi girl ran away from her ISIS owners and was caught and brought before an ISIS judge who asked her why she ran. She told the judge she had been raped, and he told her, “That is allowed.” Then she told him she’d been starved, food withheld for days on end, and he said, “That’s not right, they aren’t allowed to do that, that is mistreatment.” He acquitted her of running away, took her away from her owners and gave her to another ISIS family.
3. Men as well as women had to follow a Salafi dress code which included pants worn above the ankle. One woman’s husband who had dementia was repeatedly arrested for violating the pants rule cause he couldn’t remember it. Eventually his wife took him to a doctor who wrote a medical excuse for him to carry around and the morals police stopped arresting him.
4. ISIS tried to bribe the impoverished local population to join their side. One poor woman with a baby was visited multiple times by female members of the ISIS morals police, who said they’d heard she was in need and gave her things like baby formula and other basic supplies. They made several visits like it was a charitable act then started making not all that subtle hints that maybe she should sign up with them, since they’d been so good to her and all.
5. The book mentions a case of an Iraqi Christian girl who was enslaved. I had not seen any other reports of Christians being enslaved in the Islamic State, only Yazidis. As “people of the book”, Christians were theoretically protected in the Islamic State as long as they paid a tax. Obviously this protection was not consistent.
6. Older women were sometimes able to get away with violating the dress code, something younger women would be arrested and severely whipped for. One woman, stopped by an ISIS person cause she had no niqab, said, “I’m an old lady!” and he was like “So you are, carry on.”
7. There was a Yazidi woman who found out, shortly after being enslaved, forcibly converted and “married” to an ISIS guy, that she was pregnant. The timing indicated the father had to be her Yazidi husband, not her ISIS “husband.” When she told her ISIS “husband”, his reaction once he realized the baby wasn’t his was very odd. He didn’t kill her. He didn’t force her to have an abortion. He went online and joined some Facebook groups where Yazidis were looking for their abducted, enslaved family members. In this way he got in touch with her family and he returned her to them. He also gave her a copy of their Islamic State marriage contract and told her to use it to keep herself from being re-enslaved, since the contract was proof she was a Muslim and married. It didn’t work. ISIS recaptured and re-enslaved her again a few months later. She never saw her ISIS “husband” again after he set her free, and doesn’t know what became of him.