ISIS Occupation and Oppression
This series will give an in-depth look at women's security in the Kurdish Region of Iraq (KRI). Gender politics and violence have long been hot topics in international discourse. The emphasis the UN and western democracies place on gender equality has led to extensive research on women's lived experiences. The Middle East, in particular, has found itself under the microscope. Trigger Warning: This series contains a discussion of domestic violence, sexual violence, murder, and modern slavery.
The series is broken into five parts; an introduction to the area and issues, democratization and gender security, independence movements and gender representation, the ISIS occupation and gender oppression, and conclusions on gendered life in the KRI.
The emergence of ISIS in northern Iraq posed the single greatest threat to Kurdish women since before the fall of Sadam Hussein. Originating from the Wahhabi movement, rooted in conservative interpretations of Islamic texts and promoting violence in the name of jihad, ISIS maintained one of the most oppressive regimes this century. The ISIS policies were felt most harshly by women. Pavičić-Ivelja (2017) synthesizes the gender violence of ISIS into two main categories: the subjugation of women by removing their agency and rights, and the sexual enslavement and murder of women (p. 143).
ISIS's subjugation of women was focused on women's appearances in public. Kurdish women in areas attacked by ISIS were rendered invisible as they were removed from public life and punished for defying strict dress codes. In context, Kurdish women in the KRI had become increasingly visible in the years preceding the ISIS conflict (Begikhani, Hamelink and Weiss, 2018, p. 6). This stripped Kurdish women of their agency and all human rights, objectifying them and destroying the improvements in their political situation.
The security situation of Kurdish women was equally impacted. The progress in securing Kurdish women against gender-based violence mentioned above was held back by focusing on the ISIS conflict, and the gendered effects of security threats in occupied areas were notable. Hundreds of women in Northern Iraq were executed, raped, or sold into jihadist sex slavery (Hoffman et al., 2018). These atrocities are acknowledged within governmental and academic sources as a form of "femicide". This term addresses "execution of violence against women and girl-children because of their gender to the point of death" (Rajan, 2016). The human rights abuses of ISIS were highly gendered and attacked Kurdish women's security. Therefore, the detrimental effects of the ISIS occupation on the political and security situation of Kurdish women cannot be understated.
The impact of the ISIS regime in occupied Kurdish territory is key to understanding Kurdish women's evolving political and security situation. However, the fight against ISIS has raised other questions about women's participation in the political and security spheres of the KRI. While women have been a part of the Peshmerga, the Kurdish military, since before 2003, it is only in the last few years that their military operations involvement has been highlighted through the fight against ISIS. The vital role that all-female units played on the Basheer front in 2014 and the liberation of Mosul in 2016 are evidence of their empowerment and control over their security. However, many academic sources claim that the female Kurdish fighters' image is fetishized, and the reality of gender insecurity is primarily ignored (Toivanen and Baser, 2016). The women fighting against ISIS in the Peshmerga, Jeffreys (2007) argues, face the same risks of both attacks from ISIS and the patriarchal military structure in which they work. The sexual domination prevalent in all military structures is a danger to female soldiers who are raped and sexually abused by their male colleagues. The same glorification of Kurdish women's freedoms that was argued in the second "Gender in the KRI" report may apply to women's fetishization in the Kurdish military.
The empowerment of Kurdish women in determining their security is still significant in the face of patriarchal cultures, whether ISIS or the Peshmerga. However, the positive impact of women's empowerment does not compare to the magnitude of damage ISIS has wrought on occupied territories and the lasting effects of the occupation. Kaya's analysis of ISIS's effects on ethnically Kurdish Yazidi women and girls evidences the effects of internal displacement. The political and security situations of the over 300,000 Yazidi's in displacement camps in the Duhok Governorate are at risk (Kaya, 2019, p. 7). International attention to the Yazidi's plight has benefited the security situation of some; however, the aforementioned gendered effects of violence and political repression impact these vulnerable groups disproportionately. This evidence suggests that while many claim that ISIS's regime of terror and gender violence has ended, their legacy continues to be a destructive force in women's security situations in the KRI.
This section identifies the unequal impact of ISIS occupation on the Kurdish population based on their gender. 'Femicide' is, perhaps, the most gendered of all violent action. The vastly unequal effects of the ISIS conflict directly contradict Begikhani, Hamelink, and Weiss's (2018) perspective, which argues that women are victimized based on western political norms. The impact of violence to the point of murder is not an imposition of western norms and views. This contradiction highlights the importance of the specific theoretical lens used to understand the experience of Kurdish women. Postcolonial feminist perspectives, while useful in some analysis, can exclude information that is vitally important to the analysis of Kurds' security and political situations in Iraq.
The lasting impacts of ISIS on gender security and representation will be seen in the coming years. However, the regime's violently patriarchal impact highlights the precarious place women's security and representation hold in Kurdish Iraqi society.
Sources:
Begikhani, N., Hamelink, W. and Weiss, N. (2018). Theorising women and war in Kurdistan: A feminist and critical perspective. Kurdish Studies, 6(1), pp.5–30.
Hoffman, Y.S.G., Grossman, E.S., Shrira, A., Kedar, M., Ben-Ezra, M., Dinnayi, M., Koren, L., Bayan, R., Palgi, Y. and Zivotofsky, A.Z. (2018). Complex PTSD and its correlates amongst female Yazidi victims of sexual slavery living in post-ISIS camps. World Psychiatry, 17(1), pp.112–113.
Jeffreys, S. (2007). Double jeopardy: Women, the US military and the war in Iraq. Women’s Studies International Forum, 30(1), pp.16–25.
Kaya, Z. (2019). Iraq’s Yazidis And Isis: The Causes and Consequences Of Sexual Violence In Conflict. [online] London: LSE Middle East Centre, pp.1–24. Available at: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/102617/1/Kaya_yazidis_and_isis_published.pdf [Accessed 10 Nov. 2020].
Pavičić-Ivelja, K. (2017). The Rojava Revolution: Women’s Liberation as an Answer to the Kurdish Question. West Croatian History Journal, 11, pp.131–149.
Rajan, V.G.J. (2016). Women, Violence, and the Islamic State: Resurrecting the Caliphate through Femicide in Iraq and Syria. In: Violence and Gender in the Globalized World: The Intimate and the Extimate. New York: Taylor & Francis, pp.45–93.
Toivanen, M. and Baser, B. (2016). Gender in the Representations of an Armed Conflict. Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication, 9(3), pp.294–314.