Divide and Conquer: The Strategy and Enduring Legacy of Islamic State’s Governance of Civilian Women

This article includes excerpts from The Unforgotten Women of the Islamic State, published by Oxford University Press in September 2024.

Over 10 years has passed since the establishment of the so-called ‘caliphate’ by the Islamic State (IS/Daesh) group in Iraq and Syria. At its peak, IS governed a population of over 11 million, seizing unilateral control over checkpoints and transport networks, law enforcement and judicial bodies, public services and taxation, and the private lives, customs, and institutions of its governed population. Core to IS’s governance was the creation of a new society, the vision of which was underpinned by binarised and gender-essentialised roles for men and women. In contrast to jihadist masculinity performed through violence, dominance, and military prowess, the group’s vision of womanhood centred on purdah, piety, and non-violent jihad. These ideals determined who should have access to power and resources within the ‘caliphate’. IS’s feminine archetype served to set and legitimate different roles and regulations for women, by men. However, not all women within IS territory did, could, or aspired to embody this ideal. While perhaps a force for internal cohesion for affiliated female supporters, for ‘Other’ women, unfulfillment or non-compliance became grounds for violent discrimination.

The Forgotten Women of the Islamic State

Within its occupied towns and villages, IS’s rule was all-encompassing and unavoidable. Women were expected to live in the shadows, or at least a shadow-caliphate. If it were deemed necessary to leave the private domestic sphere, public outings were subject to strict dress and conduct regulations to be contained within all-female institutions and delineated spaces. It is here where interactions between women in IS reveal critical intra-gendered inequalities.

A salient example is public services relating to childbirth. Throughout IS’s governance years, marriage and family planning were repurposed from private, individual matters to a collective duty of procreation for the ‘caliphate’. The group banned prescription and sale of contraceptive medication in its pharmacies, directly impacting—or proactively shaping—the population’s medical needs and its interactions with healthcare institutions. These facilities were promoted in official videos and magazine articles as part of the ‘Islamic State Health Service’, as well as the unofficial blog of a female IS doctor who explicitly extolled the ante- and post-natal care provided.

The reality for local unaffiliated civilians was very different. Within all-female hospital wings, those explicitly labelled by IS administrators as ‘non-mujahid’ families faced inflated fees for prescriptions and patient registration, incorrect medication dispensed by medical students or entirely untrained staff, and surgical procedures undertaken with either expired anaesthetic or none altogether. The targeted and purposive nature of such ill-treatment is encapsulated by one woman’s traumatic birth of her third child in al-Risāla Hospital in the centre of Raqqa:

I had given birth before, so this wasn’t supposed to be an alien experience for me. I knew what to expect but what I got was completely different. At first, when I walked into the hospital, everyone was a woman; all the staff were female—the nurses, the doctor, the people preparing the beds—because no men were allowed. The hospital wasn’t equipped at all. I went in and they tied me up. I was in pain and they started tying me down to the bed. I asked them, ‘Why are you tying me up? This is not how delivery is supposed to happen.’ They said to me, ‘Shut up, we know what we are doing. Who told you to get pregnant in the first place? We are trying to get rid of all of you; we can’t get rid of you soon enough! So who told you to get pregnant in the first place? You’re going to have to deal with [the consequences].’ Because of the fact that the doctor was Daeshi, they didn’t see us as part of them; they didn’t see us as one of them. They thought of us as civilians, with the impression that they think we can’t kill you, because if we kill you there will not be enough people to legitimise the state. We have to live with you but we will treat you like this. […] I was given anaesthetic but it was not good enough, because I woke up in the last ten minutes of the operation. It was really shocking. I must have lost consciousness again, because all I remember is that I opened my eyes and saw people’s shadows and I could see people around me. I could see that my stomach was no longer big, but that it was still open. I must’ve passed out again from the pain and shock.

This narrative is not only harrowing, it reflects the hypocrisy and performativity of ‘care’ for the group’s subjects. The female IS-affiliated staff self-differentiated from female civilians whom they were ‘trying to get rid of’ and only provided healthcare as an aesthetic necessity. The woman effectively described butchery and physical torture of her dehumanised body, legitimised by the façade of a hospital—an institution traditionally associated with care and compassion.

This is not the account of a foreign IS ‘muhājira’ (female migrant recruit). Far from it. You will never find this perspective in the group’s glossy propaganda. Stories like the above are sadly not unique, but have largely been overlooked. The ‘forgetting’ of local civilian women’s experiences of IS occupation has been perpetuated by the almost exclusive focus of scholarship, policy, and media on the recruitment and operational roles of the estimated 6,902 foreign muhājirāt to IS territory. Sensationalised and often fetishised, these women have dominated debates and headlines concerning ‘women in IS’, creating an incomplete picture of the group and its governance strategy.

My new book, The Unforgotten Women of the Islamic State, seeks to shift this focus. First-hand accounts of 63 Syrian, Iraqi, and Kurdish civilian (Sunni Muslim and Yazidi) women reveal that they were far from forgotten in IS’s strategy of governance. Rather, local civilian women’s subordinate positioning within the group’s revised societal hierarchy was integral to the functioning and legitimation of the ‘caliphate’.

Governance Through an Intersectional Lens

Within the context of sovereign states, institutions and systems frequently disadvantage women on account of their gender, and further compound discrimination on the basis of other aspects of identity. This acknowledgement of multiple and overlapping oppressions is the cornerstone of intersectionality. Testimonies from local civilian women – such as the example above – reveal how deviations from the group’s ideal vision of womanhood operated to shape and effect compounding oppressions. In other words, IS governed through an intersectional lens. Recognising its female populace as heterogeneous, the group’s governance divided and delineated women according to multiple, intersecting axes of difference, namely age, class, nationality, ethno-religious identity, and group affiliation. Importantly, this strategy was not limited to women-specific policies, but instead permeated across interconnected aspects and spaces of ‘caliphate’ governance: militarisation of society; law and order; provision of goods and services; and intervention in the private lives of its populations.

From the group’s initial invasion and seizure of territory, to the consolidation and eventual collapse of the physical ‘caliphate’, women were integral to IS’s practice of war. Yet, not all women were fought for or protected. Divergence from the ideal militant identity rendered unaffiliated women ineligible to perform ‘female jihad’ through the roles of wife, widow, and mother to an IS mujahid. The result was the consistent reproduction of an intra-female hierarchy that guaranteed and rewarded the supremacy of affiliated women over civilians and captives. For Sunni women, protection and security required erasure of unaffiliated status, namely through widow remarriage. By contrast, Yazidi women’s enslavement and classification as sabāyā (female prisoners of war) co-constituted their vulnerability and legitimated their victimisation as part of a broader project of militaristic conquest driven by IS-affiliated men and, in some cases, supported by IS-affiliated women.

The subordination of local civilian women was not restricted to the frontlines. Far from its propagandised egalitarian justice system, IS’s enforcement of law and order reinforced the paternalistic authority of its militants, and legitimated the cascaded power of elite affiliated women and guardianship by civilian men. First-hand experiences of the group’s edicts and court rulings reveal the power differential between civilians and the IS-affiliated women tasked with their policing and even slave ‘ownership’. The enforcement of the group’s behavioural codes exposed—rather than erased—overt markers of difference among women, which in turn shaped eligibility for recognised ‘citizenship’ and associated entitlements.

Investment in and management of public welfare—particularly healthcare, education, and utilities—were fundamental to IS’s state-building aspirations, branding, and pragmatic legitimacy as a governing actor. However, as territorial occupation strained, finite resources became precious commodities for which access was commensurate with women’s constructed identities and statuses. The increasing exploitation and impoverishment of the unaffiliated, lower-class, and ‘infidel’ populations juxtaposed and facilitated opportunities for affiliated and educated women within the group’s segregated all-female (semi-)public sphere. Differing eligibility for IS ‘citizenship’ and its associated benefits shatter the veneer of the group’s ‘inclusive’ service provision and employment opportunities, and instead underpin group affiliation as necessary for improvement of personal status—and basic survival.

IS’s quest for unconstrained access and influence extended to the private lives and spaces of its governed population. In particular, women’s reproductive capabilities adopted ideological significance in the ‘caliphate’ project. Through the regulated institution of marriage, and forced impregnation of captives, women’s bodies became the vessel for IS’s network expansion across racial, ethnic, and national bounds. The dissolution of boundaries between the private home space and the public sphere was not universally experienced or welcomed by local women. For Sunni civilians, a private home offered a physical barrier from public scrutiny, discrimination, and violence. By contrast, the intersection of Yazidi women’s gendered and ethnicised identities rendered them vulnerable to extreme violence – by IS men and women – that even infringed IS’s own regulations. Thus, for some, the domestic sphere constituted an unregulated space of victimisation, wherein private and undocumented violations served a political purpose.

Across these areas of IS’s governance, the group’s stratification of women was integral to the functioning of its ‘caliphate’ project. Rebel groups cannot, and do not, take their relationship with the local civilian population for granted. This includes women. Even when excluded from an imagined citizenry or constituency, civilian women play a vital role in a group’s construction and contestation of legitimacy. In its societal revisioning, IS governed how different men, women, boys, and girls should behave, interact, and have power. The result is a self-fulfilling prophecy. The continuous disempowerment, securitisation, and victimisation of particular women in particular ways and spaces served to reproduce the group’s ideals and legitimate the ‘need’ for its governance. The local civilian woman in IS was the ultimate victim, the ‘bad woman’ exemplar to be punished, the ‘Othered’ woman to be conquered and property to be traded, and the vessel through which to expand the transnational group. As a figurehead, witness, and victim of IS’s violent state-building, she was integral to the group’s governance as subject of overlapping systems of domination to be manipulated for a selected ideological, tactical, or strategic purpose. As a fledgling proto-state, IS needed the presence, dependency, and victimisation of local civilian women—as ‘Othered’— to legitimate its governance and reify the comparative power and privileges of affiliated men and women.

Beyond the ‘Caliphate’: Unforgetting Civilian Women

Recognition of IS’s aims and means to fragment local communities is critical to inform efforts for recovery and reconciliation. Following the liberation of the group’s final enclave in Baghouz in March 2019, 56,000 suspected IS-affiliated men, women, and children remain in limbo in Iraqi prisons and detention centres controlled by the Syrian Democratic Forces. However, as authorities scramble to find evidence to prosecute alleged members, debates have largely centred on the repatriation and reintegration of IS’s muhājirāt. Post liberation, the hypervisibility of the group’s foreign female supporters continues to eclipse the voices and concerns of local Iraqi, Syrian, and Kurdish women.

Recovery efforts must be fully inclusive in order to be meaningful and transformative. Iraq’s anti-terrorism legislation is all-encompassing, criminalising membership of a designated organisation with the same penalty applied irrespective of an individual’s role or crimes committed therein. Cursory trials and 98 per cent conviction rate has resulted in 3,000 IS-affiliated persons sentenced to death for general membership, with little input from afflicted local communities. To date, Iraq has not passed legislation to prosecute international crimes in its territory, thereby erasing the diverse forms of victimisation of the group’s governed population. For the Yazidi community in particular, this lack of a robust legal framework has hampered efforts to provide justice and restitution through the 2021 Yazidi Survivors Law. Instead, Iraqi courts have resorted to merely referring to the law in sentencing. However, even within this system, liberated civilian women can play a valuable role as victim-witnesses to the group’s undocumented crimes. As a result of IS’s proto-state structure, they interacted with affiliated men and women across public institutions and private spaces. Owing to the testimony of Ashwaq Haji Hamid Talo, Mohammed Rashid Sahab is the only person to be sentenced in Iraq for convictions of IS membership and ‘the rape and abduction of Yazidi women.’ The inclusivity of this domestic case sadly remains an exception, and the charges fall short of the international crimes of slave trade and sexual enslavement.

Beyond Iraq, work is underway to amass evidence of crimes against humanity, genocide, and war crimes against some of the group’s most high-profile members. Survivors have begun to step forward to assist in the conviction of their abusers; however, with the notable exception of prosecutions in Germany, few female IS supporters have faced charges for their part in intra-gendered violence against civilians. Whilst such international proceedings are now amassing pace – with further trials upcoming in the Netherlands, Sweden, Germany and France, – survivor groups have criticised such individual trials as a ‘stop-gap measure’ for a broader, coordinated mechanism for localised justice. This was the intended purpose for the United Nations mission to collect and preserve evidence of crimes committed by Islamic State in Iraq (UNITAD). However, the mandate closed prematurely on 17 September 2024. Lack of coordination between UNITAD and Iraqi authorities has resulted in only nine prosecutions. This failed mission is another devastating blow for efforts to rebuild and reconcile communities who must continue to turn to civil society and community programmes for recognition and assistance.

Ten years on, the ‘caliphate’ has collapsed, but little dust has settled. Local and international responses to IS victimisation have been constrained by funding shortages, lack of political will, uncoordinated evidence collection, and logistical complications of working with non-state actors. Specifically, efforts to secure justice and security have been largely divided in focus between recovery of specific minority communities or the potential reintegration of affiliated members, leaving the needs of many civilian populations unrecognised and unaddressed. In order to secure meaningful justice and reconciliation, efforts must be fully inclusive and respond directly to the targeted and intersecting violences experienced during IS occupation. The testimonies and needs of local civilian women cannot continue to be forgotten.