Women Forcefully Married off Escaped Syria Shares Ordeal

According to Sky news, two women forcefully married to IS fighters escaped Syrian city Raqqa, an IS stronghold, and were smuggled to southern Turkey earlier this year. They are afraid IS fighters will find them.
Doaa (not her real name), 20, left Syria after her Saudi Arabian husband, an IS fighter, blew himself up in a suicide attack.

She has told Sky News she grew to love her husband and he convinced her that life in the so-called Islamic State was the right path.

Her role in the brigade was to punish women who didn't follow IS's strict rules. She even carried out the lashing herself.

She explained the different levels of punishment: "If the woman tries to escape when we arrest her then she'll get 60 lashes.

"Otherwise, when it comes to clothes, if she's not wearing the abaya (Islamic dress) or she's wearing high heels then it's the standard 40 lashes."

Doaa says she now regrets what she did.

 

"What upset me most was lashing old women when they weren't wearing the proper clothes.

"These women were like my mother. I mean for girls, yes, they should wear the proper attire but old women no.

"They'd lash them and humiliate them."

The al Khansa Brigade was set up by IS last year to crack down on women who don't abide by their strict laws, including that they be fully covered in public and always chaperoned by a male.

It involves four weeks of weapons training and the women are paid around £70 per month.

They mainly patrol the streets, man checkpoints and raid houses.

Umm Ous (not her real name) says she met many foreign women - from Europe and even Japan - in the Brigade.

But whereas the Arab women were in charge of policing and running the city's affairs, she says non-Arab women were often allowed on the front lines.

 

Sky News