WorldWatch Monitor | March 8, 2019
It would be hard to argue the world is unaware that Islamic State fighters used rape and sexual violence as a weapon of war against Iraq’s Yazidi women: Nadia Murad shared the 2018 Nobel Prize after she told the world of her personal ordeal at their hands.
However, testimonies from minority Christian women in northern Iraq and Syria, who also were subject to similar violations, are comparatively rare. One who bravely shared what happened to her is Rita, from the Iraqi town of Qaraqosh, who was 26 when the Islamic State invaded in summer 2014 and took her captive. She was sold and bought four times as a sex slave before being freed in 2017; finally she was reunited with her father almost four years after she was taken captive.
The UN has now formally started to investigate IS crimes in the region. A senior Muslim cleric has said the UN team also should focus on “abductions, slavery and sexual violence” suffered by minority women there. Experts have told World Watch Monitor that Christian women are not speaking out in the way Nadia Murad has been able to, either because they are still too traumatized, or perhaps because they find their treatment “too shaming” and find it hard to speak out publicly.
It’s this “hidden” persecution suffered by women, often going un-acknowledged by both the victims themselves and their communities, that is the focus of the latest report from the Research Unit of Open Doors, which every year compiles the World Watch List of the 50 most difficult countries in which to live as a Christian.