The fall of Mosul in June 2014 did not merely signal a territorial conquest; it marked the beginning of a systematic campaign of enslavement, sexual violence, and genocide against the Yazidi people, a campaign that was meticulously planned, religiously justified, and bureaucratically administered by the Islamic State group.

In 2013, young women in Iraq could attend university, run a shop, or sit in a café without seeking permission from any man. Within a year, that world was shattered. The regime that replaced it operated under a written code of rules enforced without debate, and what followed was far worse than a simple loss of freedom.

On June 10, 2014, fighters from the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, known as ISIS, seized Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city with a population of nearly two million. The Iraqi army defending the city had roughly ten soldiers for every ISIS fighter, giving the defenders a theoretical advantage. But when ISIS attacked, many Iraqi soldiers abandoned their positions, fleeing the city and leaving behind weapons, military vehicles, and uniforms that ISIS fighters quickly seized.

Three weeks later, on June 29, the group’s leader appeared at the pulpit of the Great Mosque of al-Nuri in Mosul. His real name was Ibrahim Awad Ibrahim al-Badri, but the world knew him as Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. From the mosque, he declared the establishment of a caliphate, a state claiming to rule according to Islamic law under a caliph who asserts authority over all Muslims.

Al-Baghdadi declared himself that leader, and the group dropped the words Iraq and Syria from its name, calling itself simply the Islamic State.

Al-Baghdadi’s new state was not just a group of fighters controlling territory. He built a complete system of governance around the areas he controlled, establishing courts to enforce his interpretation of Sharia law, a police force to control the population, his own currency, and written rules covering nearly every aspect of daily life. These rules included detailed instructions on how to treat women, but there was a fundamental difference.

The Islamic State did not treat all women the same way. A woman’s religion, age, and whether she was Muslim or not could completely change what the group believed it was permitted to do to her.

Five weeks after the fall of Mosul, those beliefs became the basis for a campaign of mass killing, abduction, and enslavement in Sinjar. Sinjar is a mountainous region in northern Iraq, near the border with Syria, and it was home to the Yazidis, a religious minority then estimated at around 400,000 people. The Yazidis follow an ancient faith that predates Islam by a long time and contains elements developed from several older religious traditions.

ISIS religious authorities had already decided how to treat the Yazidis. Under strict interpretations of Sharia law, Christians and Jews are considered People of the Book and entitled to certain forms of legal protection. ISIS did not grant the Yazidis this status.

Instead, they declared them pagans and thus claimed they were denied this protection.

On the morning of August 3, 2014, ISIS fighters attacked Sinjar from multiple directions simultaneously. Kurdish Peshmerga fighters, the military forces responsible for protecting the area, withdrew within hours, leaving thousands of Yazidis with virtually no protection. ISIS fighters then advanced into surrounding villages, including Kocho, Tal Azer, and Sebashi Khidr.

They gathered entire village populations, forcing them to assemble in places like schools and public squares where they could be controlled and separated.

Men and boys who had reached fighting age, typically 12 years and older, were separated from women and young children. Many were led to open areas and executed by gunfire. The United Nations later estimated that approximately 5,000 Yazidi men were killed in the first days of the attack alone.

Many of these victims were buried in mass graves, and more than a decade later, investigators are still discovering and examining graves containing victims of the Sinjar massacre.

Approximately 6,800 women and children were not killed but were captured and loaded onto buses and trucks. At the same time, tens of thousands of Yazidis fled on foot toward the arid Sinjar mountain range, where they were trapped on the mountains with ISIS fighters besieging them below. They had little food, almost no water, and no safe place to go.

A joint operation by Kurdish forces and the United States helped break the siege after several days, but the women and children who were captured had no way to reach the mountains. They were driven toward Mosul, where ISIS had established a system for processing and distributing them.

ISIS did not describe the capture of Yazidi women as merely something that happened during war. They treated them as private property and publicly defended this position. In October 2014, Dabiq, the group’s official English-language magazine, published an article claiming that enslaving Yazidi women was permissible according to the group’s interpretation of Sharia law.

This claim was based specifically on ISIS’s classification of Yazidis as non-believers. In other words, this was not just an individual decision by fighters to commit these crimes. The ISIS leadership was religiously justifying them, codifying that justification, and distributing it through the group’s propaganda.

The captured women were first taken to detention centers in Mosul and its surroundings, and the nearby city of Tal Afar. These centers were used to gather and control the women before moving them elsewhere. Many were later transferred to Syria, particularly to Raqqa, the city on the Euphrates River that ISIS had turned into the center of its declared state and de facto capital.

In places like Mosul, Tal Afar, and Raqqa, ISIS ran what survivors and researchers later described as slave markets for “sabaya,” the term the group used for captive women. Women and girls, some as young as nine years old, were held inside buildings controlled by the group, including former schools and wedding halls. They were then presented to ISIS fighters who came to inspect them and choose whom they wished to take as slaves.

Human Rights Watch and other investigators later obtained internal ISIS documents showing how the group created actual price lists for these women and girls, with age being one of the factors used to determine their price. One price list, associated with ISIS administrative offices, indicated that an adult woman’s price ranged from approximately 100 to 200 US dollars. Young girls, aged between one and nine years, were recorded at significantly higher prices, with some costing more than double that amount.

A fighter could buy a woman, hold her for weeks or months, and then sell her to another fighter. Some captives were moved between Iraq and Syria as they were transferred between owners. Survivor testimonies describe women being sold and resold ten or more times over the following two to three years.

In late 2014, ISIS’s religious police issued a written booklet setting out rules for dealing with captives. The booklet included instructions on when sexual contact with an enslaved woman was considered permissible according to the group’s interpretation of Sharia. It also included rules discouraging fighters from selling captives to their relatives.

The booklet reads more like an official rulebook than the words of random criminals, which is precisely why it became so important to investigators.

Girls were also forced to convert to Islam. They were given new names and forced to memorize verses from the Quran, often under threat of beatings if they failed. Some girls and women were deliberately handed over to foreign ISIS fighters as an incentive to join the group, turning human beings into a recruitment tool.

Once a captive was handed to a particular fighter, her daily life depended almost entirely on him. He decided her fate, whether that meant beating her, moving her elsewhere, selling her, or even granting her the smallest degree of freedom. Because she could be moved at any time, any small amount of safety could suddenly vanish.

One woman who went through this system eventually survived long enough to show the world what ISIS had done. Nadia Murad was 21 years old and living in the Yazidi village of Kocho when ISIS fighters captured her on August 15, 2014, twelve days after the group’s main attack on the Sinjar region began. Her mother and six of her brothers were killed.

Nadia was taken to Mosul and sold as a slave. Over the following months, she was beaten and raped repeatedly by several men.

Nadia eventually managed to escape with the help of a Sunni family in Mosul, who hid her, protected her, and helped her reach a checkpoint controlled by Kurdish forces. Once she reached safety, Nadia became one of the most important witnesses to what ISIS had done to the Yazidis. She testified before the United States Security Council in December 2015 and later told her story in her memoir, “The Last Girl.”

Nadia’s testimony, along with that of thousands of other Yazidi survivors, formed a crucial part of the evidence behind the 2016 United Nations Human Rights Council decision, which concluded that ISIS’s campaign against the Yazidis amounted to genocide. The sexual enslavement of Yazidi women was specifically identified as one of the means used in that campaign, because forcing women into sexual slavery, separating families, and killing men and boys would prevent the continuation of the Yazidi community. In 2018, Nadia Murad received the Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts to advocate for victims of human trafficking and sexual violence, particularly Yazidi women and girls.

While the genocide of the Yazidis was being committed, something entirely different was happening elsewhere. Women from outside Iraq and Syria were voluntarily traveling to ISIS-controlled areas. Even before al-Baghdadi formally declared his caliphate in Mosul, the group was running a large-scale online recruitment campaign specifically targeting women.

Between 2013 and 2018, researchers estimate that between 550 and 850 women and girls left Western countries to join ISIS. Thousands more women traveled from countries in the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia.

These women came from vastly different backgrounds, but many were young and had been exposed to ISIS propaganda online. The picture ISIS presented to these women was completely different from what awaited the Yazidis. Recruiters, including women already living inside ISIS-controlled areas, used platforms like Twitter and encrypted messaging apps to describe life in Raqqa as a close-knit sisterhood.

They presented the caliphate as a place where women could live according to their religion, find meaning in their lives, and belong to something larger than themselves.

Aqsa Mahmood, a woman from Glasgow, Scotland, was one of the most active recruiters. She left for Syria in November 2013 when she was 19 years old. Once inside ISIS-controlled territory, she created a blog offering advice to other women on how to travel there without being detected, what to bring with them, and how to avoid raising suspicion during airport interrogations.

The most famous case was that of Shamima Begum. On February 17, 2015, when she was just 15 years old, she left her home in Bethnal Green, an area in east London, accompanied by two school friends, Kadiza Sultana and Amira Abase. The three girls flew to Istanbul, Turkey, and within days were smuggled across the Turkish border into Syria, where ISIS controlled vast swathes of territory.

Shamima married a Dutch ISIS fighter shortly after arriving in Raqqa. Over the following years, she gave birth to three children, all of whom died in infancy due to malnutrition and lack of medical care inside ISIS-controlled areas. Her case became a controversial international legal issue in 2019 when she was found in a Syrian detention camp, nine months pregnant.

Instead of allowing her to return to Britain, the British government revoked her citizenship, leading to a long legal battle over whether she could return to the country.

Many women were drawn to the group through carefully managed online conversations and promises. But once they arrived, they found a reality that was completely different. They entered a system where the group controlled nearly every aspect of their lives, and leaving was extremely difficult.

This system had its own guardians, also women, called the Al-Khansaa Brigade. Formed in early 2014, it consisted of an all-female police unit in Raqqa. Named after Al-Khansaa, a famous Arab poet from the 7th century, the brigade was armed and organized as a real security unit, but its main mission was to enforce ISIS’s strict rules on women.

Members patrolled streets and markets, monitoring women’s clothing and behavior in public. Women were required to wear the full niqab, a garment covering the body with only a narrow slit around the eyes. Police members also ensured that no skin or brightly colored clothing was visible, and that women did not appear in public without a male guardian.

Violating these rules subjected offenders to immediate physical punishment. People who later escaped Raqqa described women being publicly flogged for reasons that might seem trivial, such as having their eyes too visible or wearing shoes that made noise. Many of the women enforcing these rules were teenagers or young women in their early twenties.

Some were foreign recruits from countries like Britain, France, and Tunisia.

The brigade’s work was not limited to monitoring women’s clothing. Its members also worked at checkpoints, verified people’s identities, and interrogated suspects trying to escape ISIS-controlled areas or pass information to forces fighting the group. But street patrols and checkpoints were only one part of the system.

In January 2015, the Al-Khansaa Brigade published an official document outlining ISIS’s vision for women’s role within the so-called caliphate. The document stated that “girls can be married at the age of nine.” It also claimed that the primary purpose of women was marriage, childbirth, and staying at home.

According to the statement, women who deviated from this role were considered violators of what the group called the natural order.

Foreign women who arrived in ISIS-controlled areas without husbands were usually married to its fighters within days or weeks. This was often done through informal marriage brokers working from guesthouses in Raqqa, where many new recruits were initially housed. Given the large numbers of fighters killed as military pressure on the group increased from 2015 onward, many women became widows.

The group expected them to remarry quickly rather than remain single for long. The group also changed the educational curriculum for girls to align with its ideology. Schools stopped following standard education programs, replacing much of the usual curriculum with religious teachings and political indoctrination.

Girls were taught ISIS beliefs and rules from a young age, and violating these rules was punished with severe penalties, including death. Several documented cases show women being publicly executed by stoning between 2014 and 2017 after being accused of adultery.

Despite this danger, some women attempted to escape. For Yazidi women kidnapped and enslaved by ISIS, escape usually depended on secret smuggling networks. These networks were often funded by desperate relatives in Iraq seeking to recover their loved ones.

The smugglers were mostly local Sunni Arabs sympathetic to the Yazidi community, willing to take enormous risks to help them. They arranged secret communications between captives and their families, obtained or forged travel documents when necessary, and guided women through areas still under ISIS control. Nadia Murad took this secret route in her escape from Mosul.

The Kurdistan Regional Government, the government of Iraq’s autonomous Kurdistan Region, established a specialized office to help coordinate these rescue operations, working with secret smuggling networks and helping to pay ransoms to secure the release of captives.

For foreign women who had traveled to ISIS-controlled areas voluntarily, escape was a completely different and often more dangerous situation. ISIS treated attempts to leave the “caliphate” as a serious crime punishable by death. They were trapped in the very system they had chosen to join, waiting for the war itself to change their situation.

That change came faster than many inside the “caliphate” expected. Starting in 2016, a US-led international coalition began helping local forces retake ISIS territory. In Iraq, the coalition worked alongside the Iraqi army.

In Syria, it supported the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, known as the SDF. The campaign gradually pushed ISIS out of city after city. Mosul finally fell after a nine-month battle that ended on July 10, 2017.

Raqqa fell on October 17, 2017, after a four-month battle.

As ISIS lost territory, its treatment of enslaved women became more chaotic. Some fighters killed their captives rather than allow advancing forces to find and liberate them. Others abandoned women amid the chaos of retreating convoys.

For some Yazidi women, this chaos provided the first real opportunity to escape. The last major battle took place in Baghuz, a small village on the Euphrates River in eastern Syria, near the Iraqi border. By early 2019, this last remaining patch of ISIS territory was crowded with thousands of people.

The SDF surrounded the area and gradually tightened its grip. When Baghuz finally fell on March 23, 2019, it marked the end of ISIS’s control over any significant territory.

Afterward, tens of thousands of women and children associated with ISIS were transferred to detention camps in northeastern Syria. These camps were under the control of the Kurdish authorities who had fought ISIS during the war. The largest was Al-Hol camp, which at its peak held more than 70,000 people, mostly women and children.

Camp Roj, another major camp, held thousands more, including a large number of foreigners whose home countries often refused to take them back. For thousands of women, the fall of ISIS did not bring a happy ending, and its effects remain visible today inside the detention camps in the Syrian desert.