Report: ISIS slave markets sell girls for 'as little as a pack of cigarettes'

(The Guardian) Teenage girls abducted by Islamic State fighters in Iraq and Syria are being sold in slave markets “for as little as a pack of cigarettes”, the UN envoy on sexual violence said on Monday.

Zainab Bangura visited Iraq and Syria in April, and has since been working on an action plan to address the horrific sexual violence being waged by Isis fighters.

“This is a war that is being fought on the bodies of women,” Bangura said.

The UN envoy spoke to women and girls who had escaped from captivity in Isis-controlled areas, met with local religious and political leaders and visited refugees in Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan.

Jihadists continued to run slave markets for girls abducted during fresh offensives, but there were no figures on the numbers enslaved by the fighters, she said.

“They kidnap and abduct women when they take areas so they have – I don’t want to call it a fresh supply – but they have new girls,” she said.

Girls are sold for “as little as a pack of cigarettes” or for several hundred or thousand dollars, she said.

Bangura described the ordeal of several teenage girls, many of whom were part of the Yazidi minority targeted by the jihadists.

“Some were taken, locked up in a room – over 100 of them in a small house – stripped naked and washed.”

They were then made to stand in front of a group of men who decided “what you are worth”.

Bangura gave the account of a 15-year-old girl who was sold to an Isis leader, a sheikh aged in his 50s, who showed her a gun and a stick and asked her “tell me what you want”.

“She said ‘the gun’ and he replied: ‘I didn’t buy you so that you could kill yourself’,” before raping her, Bangura said.

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