While the war against the Islamic State is largely being waged by men, the women and children are the ones who carry more of the burden from violence, and there is little support for those who survive, a UN report revealed.
The ISIS, which aims to create its own caliphate from existing war-torn countries to redraw international frontiers, has been successful in recruiting fighters with the promise of giving them women they could choose to rape with impunity, according to the UN report as quoted in Frontline.
"This is a war that is being fought on the bodies of women," said Zainab Hawa Bangura, the United Nations' special representative on sexual violence in conflict. "It's important for us to recognize that."
ISIS has integrated sexual violence into its system, creating slave markets and price lists according to the age of victims, Bangura said.
Those who were able to escape the clutches of ISIS, however, receive little support given the limited resources to help their ever-increasing ranks, the UN representative said.
In Iraq, around 5.6 million people have been forced to flee their homes because of the conflict, while at least 15,000 have been killed and 30,000 injured since January 2014, the UN report said.
The report, compiled by the UN Assistance Mission for Iraq and the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and released last week, stated that in ISIS-controlled territories, "civilians continued to be murdered, often in grim public spectacles."
The UN has already asked the international community for $498 million to give food, water, shelter and some basic education and health care to those who were able to escape ISIS. But only 30 percent of the amount has been received by the UN, according to Grainne O'Hara, the deputy representative for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Baghdad.
"The services that are being provided to people are completely inadequate," O'Hara said. "And I mean food — basic things — before we get into the specific things like psychosocial support for people who have been through particularly traumatic experiences."
Women of the Yazidi community, many of whom were taken as slaves by the ISIS, have managed to escape the jihadist group, but they return not to their homes but to makeshift camps in tent cities.
"There's a lot of attention focused — rightly — on getting them released and free, but less effort on what happens to them when they are released," said Samer Muscati, a researcher for Human Rights Watch.
Muscati said while there is medical attention given to Yazidis who were ISIS victims, only one of the 20 girls he talked to had psychological care.
Yazidi religious leader Baba Sheikh noted that former ISIS female captives are shunned as they are presumed to have been raped and forced to convert to Islam—an unforgivable sin to Yazidis.
However, Sheikh said the Yazidi women are now welcomed back into their community where cleansing ceremonies await them to wash away what they experienced in the hands of ISIS. They are then reconverted to the Yazidi religion.
However, some women are pregnant with children of ISIS members, a major problem for those who do not have the means to support these children.
The UN said that 3,500 women and children of the Yazidi community remain captive under ISIS, suffering physical and sexual violence every day.
"These acts appear to form part of an ongoing policy that aims to suppress, permanently expel, or destroy many of these communities within ISIL areas of control," read the UN report.
